Thanks for clearing that up. 
My Lai, for example, would qualify under that definition.
Definitely.
But on a larger scale, US wars in Japan, Korea, Vietnam (including Laos and Cambodia) cost the lives of about 2,500,000 civilians.
He told you wrong. While estimates of U.S. losses vary, they are all below 100 ships of all types–perhaps 14 destroyers.
You’re right. Plenty of countries like Russia, China, and Cambodia solved their incarceration problem without a single complaint from the people in prison.
Thanks for your insights.
It was well above 100 ships of all types. 15 of the 77 destroyers sunk were by kamikazes. Which would be 20% of those sunk.
He was obviously mistaken.
How do you get over 100 sunk by kamikazes from that list?
Here is what I used.
yes but that’s not what you said. You said: “He told you wrong. While estimates of U.S. losses vary, they are all below 100 ships of all types–perhaps 14 destroyers.”
I supplied the correct number of destroyers lost and how many were by kamikaze. Your statement said the losses were ALL below 100 ships of all types.
I think I now understand what you were trying to say but it was ambiguous the way it was stated.
OK, I thought it would be clear that by responding to a comment about kamikaze losses I was referring to kamikaze losses. I guess it was not clear.
I don’t beieve I’ve dismissed Hasegawa, but if I did can you point out where it was?
There are a number of historians who are engaged in a lively debate over this issue, and they disagree over the interpretation of events. Some line up on the atomic bombs being more important where others take the view that the Soviet entry was of greater significance. Still others believe that it was impossible to separate the events. I find their arguments more persuasive
However, if you read their works, you see that they are discussing the players I cited.
There are a number of interesting articles on the subject. Asada gives his reasons for believing that it as the bombs here. Hasegawa rebuts of course, but if one is really interested, then Noriko Kawamura’s Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War is a must-read.
This actually completely misses the point. It was not that the generals and admirals cared that they had “lost their final excuse” because they didn’t need a final excuse. They would have fought on to the bitter end regardless.
No, the points are that first, the militarists had been using the excuse to avoid discuss surrender. They weren’t planning on agreeing to anything which the Allies would accept, so there was no point in having an internal meeting. No meeting, so talks about terms. Hiroshima changed that and forced a discussion.
Second, the Emperor made a decision to take the extra-constitutional action of intervening in his advisers’ deliberations. The six million dollar question is what prompted that. There is good reason to believe that the atomic bombs did have an influence in his reasoning, but as even Hasegawa admits, this is not documented and is entirely and purely speculation.
Finally, Gen. Anami elected to not take over the country. Both the War (Army) Minister and the Navy Ministers were required to be active duty officers. If the services so desired, one or both of them could resign and the services would refuse to agree to a replacement(s). The cabinet would fall and without the cooperation of the military, there could be no new government. Martial law would then be declared and the militarists would have succeeded.
All Anami needed to do was get up in the middle of a meeting, take a piss and walk straight out the door. He would then become the ruler of Japan, and could even sequester the Emperor. One simply does not know why he elected to follow the Emperor rather than the wishes of most of his subordinates.
(And, of course, he was personally conflicted. He sharply told the officers to obey the orders, but also didn’t move to suppress the attempted coup, nor did he inform others.)
He took his own life on his terms the day after the surrender rather than wait for the occupiers to do it for him.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
This is not pertinent to this discussion.
Discussions of the [im]morality of U.S. actions are deserving of their own thread.
This hijack is at an end.
Do not promote it. Do not attack it. Go start a different thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Your source is questionable, since it includes thus little gem:
Only if the Japanese invited them. The Soviets were utterly incapable of mounting any sort of invasion of the Home Islands in that timeframe.
Just responding to the numbers being thrown around regarding the bombing of North Korea. They’re low. Statistician and “atrocitologist” Matthew White estimates 2 million civilian deaths from the US bombing campaign in Korea. Other wars would be in addition to that.
There is zero evidence to suggest such a claim. And if you think about it, it would be pretty absurd to nuke Japan to intimidate Stalin. I’ve heard this put forth by gore Vidal, but it is a fantastic and unfounded claim. Logic lends one to the obvious fact that the US nuked Japan to avoid a mainland invasion.
Some of these insights into Japanese surrender are embarrassing to read. The subject was on firebombs vs nukes, and which is morally worse. The answer to that is that there is no discussion.
War is strategic and tactical destruction of an enemy. There are no morals in war, people. Try and grasp that. Civilian deaths are irrelevant in war. The only things I see as war crimes are sadistic examples of torture that had NOTHING to do with the war aims, like unit 731. That qualifies as a war crime. Hiroshima and nagasaki, terrible loss of life considered, were motivated by the war aim-japanese surrender. You can argue right and wrong all day, but it won’t change the landscape of warfare one iota. Accept it.
and for that matter, military life and civilian life are socially different, but loss of life is still terrible in either case. Many mothers wept for their sons killed in battle. Soldiers still had families, people still suffer when a soldier dies. And one might argue that the soldier chose to fight, but thats not totally valid. Soldiers were obligated to fight because they would be publicly shamed as cowards, or executed anyway if they refused. And there weren’t exactly huge civilian protests in Japan against the IJA because people just went along with it, just like nazi Germany.so the civilians go with the territory. Its sickening to think of children being murdered in mass bombings, no doubt. but the US was literally begging Japan to surrender, for everyone’s sake.
The Japanese high command knew that prolonged war would endanger innocent life. did that stop them? Not at all. Some of you are too squeamish to accept this, but try to grow a pair and realize that Japan would’ve done the same, and likely far worse to the US if it was powerful enough.
Just look at Nanking-250 thousand slaughtered, ALL civilians , and a good hundred thousand REPEATED rapes. Think about that number for a minute.
On the Soviet issue, let’s explore.
To say the Soviets provoked surrender is laughable. The Japanese faced TOTAL destruction by the US, regardless of Stalin’s proposed invasion, but a war with Russia was too much to bear? Get real! This is a view that has taken shape over time by Japanese scholars who seek to sanitize it’s defeat by saying that it was not their prime adversary who defeated them, but some other political element that had little relevance to what led to their defeat up until that point.
It would be like saying that I was getting my ass kicked for four years straight by one country, but deciding that another country threatening to kick my ass was the deal breaker. No one with common sense would assert this. It’s Japan’s way of saying they didn’t surrender to the US after all. But no serious scholar would believe such a thing.
All things considered, if the Japanese in fact did not surrender in response to TWO nuclear strikes with more to come, than the Japanese indeed were harboring a suicidal urge for national extinction.
However, if surrender by the Japs would have been as easy as having Stalin invade Manchuria, than the whole four years of the Pacific war were completely pointless. I don’t think the US planners considered this plausible, and with good reason …because it simply was not the case.
You are missing that that “Get Real!” shout should be directed to the Japanese leadership. We are dealing with people that made decisions based more on ideology than using reason. If we had dealt with reasonable people the Japanese leadership (and the Germans too) would had surrender much early.
Remember that we were indeed dealing with leaders that in the end did not care what was happening to the population. The point that the recent scholars that look at the timing of the surrender points to the Russian invasion as the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the situation was very similar to that of the Nazi leadership in Berlin: It was indeed, from the point of view of reasonable democracies, a very dumb idea to fight on. But as Goebbels showed by thinking that the Americans would come to rescue Germany from the Russians and then the USA to fight with Germany against the Russians :rolleyes: it was indeed a very stupid idea from the ones in Japan willing to fight on to hope that Russia would not go to war with Japan or to mediate between Japan and USA/Britain.
And it was true that even many Japanese thought that the idea was stupid (and in Germany many also thought the leadership was bananas to continue but the ones that had the strength to reject the destruction of their nation had been disposed already by Hitler and his henchmen) by continuing a pointless war, but we were not dealing with democracies or reasonable people then.
The point IMHO is a valid one, you are right that the idea to depend on Russia at the end of the war was a dumb idea, but we were dealing with the same military minds and rulers that thought that knocking out the Pacific fleet would then convince the US to back off Asia and to eventually sign a peace treaty.
Yeah, that dumb idea also did not work, but the first part was implemented. And so it goes for that desperate move to continue the war by the militaristic Japanese leaders.
You’re right. Nobody with common sense would assert that; people with uncommon education and knowledge of Japan, on the other hand, would.
I can accept this point. But the question remains-why would they surrender to a Soviet threat and not surrender to the threat of total nuclear annihilation? It just doesn’t hold water.
They did not surrender to the Soviets, they surrendered to the Allies. The Soviets were also the allies, but in the case of Japan they did not get what they wanted, to be part of the occupation in mainland Japan.
Again, you are acting as if the Japanese militaristic leaders were sensible men, they where not, just like the Nazis that preferred to see their cities destroyed rather than surrender early after there was no chance to succeed.
Not formally surrender to the Soviets, surrender to the “soviet threat”, that is the psychological surrender which is being proposed to precede the formal surrender to be allies. No need to let semantics muddy the waters here.
And besides it is irrelevant to the main point here. Hirohito made no mention of the soviet invasion of manchuria as a contributing factor to the Japanese surrender. Richard b Frank discusses this in his book Downfall. He delves into the emperors diary leading up the surrender, where the reasons of surrender are attributed to three factors.
The first being collapse of Japanese moral.
The second being lack of resources to mount a strong defense.
The third being the atomic bomb.
Personally I think the soviet factor merely coincided with the events already in motion. So there you have it. Interesting and controversial topic, although I don’t have time to debate it endlessly.