I agree. However, when people think “poor Japanese getting bombed like that” it is not inappropriate to point out that as evil regimes go they were easily on par with Nazi Germany. They needed stopping in a big way.
Yup.
Better a demonstration on Japanese cities than a test run on American and Russian cities in the late fifties.
The bombings of HIroshima and Nagasaki may have had unfortunate civilians casualties, but both were military sites and conbsidered quite acceptable targets under the standards of the day then as well as now (now we have more accurate bombs, of course). Bombings were carried out on similar sites elsewhere. The negative reaction to the bombings is hypocritical without claiming that all war is wrong, which is simply a position not really worth engaging.
True. You also have to think about whether the atomic bombing was somehow worse than conventional bombing, like that done in Tokyo and other cities. I would say it wasn’t.
Well, I think today the notion of “Total War” is beyond most people. The idea these days is to avoid civilians as much as possible and only target the enemy military. Certainly technology enables that today which was simply not possible in WWII.
Personally I think a case can be made that the enemy civilian population is a viable target. Afterall they are growing the food and building the weapons and what not to enable their side to kill you. I guess at what point can you say non-combatants rise to viable targets because they support the enemy war effort?
Allow me to indulge in a little “devil’s advocacy” here.
To use a broad brush: There is a number of people who see no difference (except in numbers) between the (Nazi) Final Solution and the (U.S.) use of the Atomic Bomb, or the (British) firebombing of Hamburg or Dresden.
I suspect that they would say that the deliberate targeting of civilians is murder, and doing so is wrong no matter what you think they did to deserve it. Pointing out the degree of evil-ness of the Nazi or Tojo regime’s is going to fall on deaf ears.
I say: It was a different time. The decision makers felt that they were fighting for their very (way of) lives. They may not have had the same facts that 20/20 hindsight has provided later generations and historians. Later generations have come to view war (in general) differently, in terms of what is acceptable in losses and overall conduct. (Possibly because of the A-bomb wake up call.) We have a slightly different culture now. I think to casually pass judgment on what they should or shouldn’t have done from a distance of 60 odd years is not fair, as it is not within the same context that the leader’s (Truman, Churchill) who had to make the very decisions had to make them in.
In fact, this was a key premise behind the concept of strategic bombing as developed in the interwar years. The concept itself was never put into play fully - the raids were, officially at least, targetted at industrial areas to a greater or lesser degree.
But the concept of strategic bombing was based around deliberately targetting civilians to make war less likely, by bringing the cost of it home to the civilian population. It was felt by many theorists that the people would not allow a war to start if they would have to bear the cost of it personally. During the interwar years, there was a large movement who felt air power alone could prevent wars, and win them. Kind of what developed into nuclear deterrence later. The idea was that air bombardments were so powerful that entire cities would be erased in the first hours of any conflict. It turned out, obviously, that air forces were not strong enough to do that. Even the thousand bomber raids and fire storms didn’t wipe out entire cities.
But I have to admit I don’t shed many tears over the bombing campaigns against either Germany or Japan. Kinda dumb to start wars and complain that the other side is better at it than you.
Calling it the British firebombing of Hamburg or Dresden, even parenthetically, is inaccurate. They were both joint missions of the RAF and USAAF.
More devils advocate: You are correct in explaining the pre-war thoery. However, the London Blitz showed that the hardships endured by that city’s population merely strengthened their resolve to win the war at all costs.
Yet “Bomber” Harris felt that he could do what the German Luftwaffe failed to do, and break the German’s will.
That seems potentially to be a little case of either naivete, or just a plain desire for revenge.
Do you think the actual German response mirrored the Londoners?
The Abombs achieved what the conventional stuff in Europe failed to do…
I was unaware (or forgot) of the U.S. participation on those operations. Thanks for the correction.
Are we assuming unconditional surrender is the only Allied option?
I need to do some digging for this, but a lot of the stuff about London continuing, bloodied but unbowed, was propaganda that became believed after the war. There’s research suggesting (I remember an interview on the radio with the author, so I don’t have hard copies of it) that British morale in the Blitz was incredibly badly shaken. In particular, there was a lot of conflict because of the provision of bomb shelters to the richer areas of London. And that the Tube stations were only opened as shelters in response to a very real threat of outbreaks of rioting in working class neighborhoods if they weren’t.
And Harris was dealing with something very different than Goering:
The German bombing of Coventry:
4,000 homes destroyed
600 people killed
1,000 people injured
500 tons of bombs dropped
Operation Gomorrah (Bombing of Hamburg):
250,000 homes destroyed
over 50,000 killed
9,000 tons of bombs dropped
It’s not unrealistic for Harris to have thought that German morale would have been shattered. The raids, particularly the earlier ones, also had an indesputable morale effect in the other direction - improving British morale at a time when they were unable to strike Germany in any other way.
I don’t think we will ever know how close the bombing raids came to breaking German will to fight. They certainly led to large scale disenchantment with the Nazi regime, in particular Goering.
How much was breaking their will to fight and how much was breaking their ability to fight? By that I mean not only smashing factories but leaving the government with thousands of homeless, stress on medical supplies, ability to provide food, workers to work in factories and so on?
I never meant to suggest there wasn’t both involved. The pure theory of strategic bombing was aimed at morale only. But the raids themselves were absolutely intended to destroy capacity to wage war as well as willingness.
Ok. I’ll be willing to take this under consideration. I have not heard (or read) that the British were close to breaking. This is news to me.
Not surprising, the effect on British moral is probably the effect of being able to exact some measure of revenge for past wrongs inflicted upon them.
But I still question Harris’ assestment as a little more in the wishfull thinking department. Note that there were definate budgetary and manning levels disputes within the war ministry. Harris probably had to overstate his bomber capabilities in order to get the equipment he think he needs (and one can never have enough reinforcements). All the services had to do this.
Not enough to enable a surrender, a’ la 1918. It took the Allied armies to overrun most of Germany to get them to surrender.
Agreed. I don’t think strategic bombing worked in an outright sense. The fact is the British didn’t crack in the end, however close they got. Nor did the Germans. The fact that Germany didn’t collapse amazes me - I would think in current times a thousand bomber raid on any US, British, French, or German city would cause a very different reaction.
Heck, it was downright generous of the Americans not to display Hirohito’s head on a pike, which as I understand it was not uncommon treatment for defeated heads of state in the old days.
I might be wrong but I want to say many German generals saw the writing on the wall and would have liked to go for a negotiated surrender while Germany still had enough oomph in it to make that a potentially attractive prospect for the Allies.
Thing is the generals had this nutjob running the show so it was never a thing they could do.
I tend to agree with Ike and McCarthur. The war was over ,we controlled the skies and were bombing almost every city in Japan. They were whipped and knew it. The people of Hiroshima thought the gods were smiling on them because they had not been bomb targets. They did not know they were being saved in an experiment, a cruel and needless one. If you believe Hiroshima was a good idea, explain Nagasaki.
Once may be a fluke. Twice is a trend - one they didn’t want to see continue.