Possibly I’m misunderstanding you, here; while it may be the case that the Japanese don’t teach Pearl Harbor, surely we teach (a) that we bombed Hiroshima, and then (b) since bombing Hiroshima wasn’t unnecessary and cruel enough to actually cause a surrender, we bombed Nagasaki – which finally rose to the level of “good enough”, just like Hiroshima didn’t?
When the hit isn’t hard enough to actually get the job done, it’s danged near impossible to admit that we did too much. There’s a reason we needed to drop that second bomb after they voted to continue the war: the first bomb didn’t even rise to the level of “necessary” on its own, and so couldn’t pass into “unnecessary” territory.
gonzomax is making the usual fallacy of looking at historical events with a “modern” perspective. We know now that atomic bombs are horrible, awful weapons. And we spent 50 years living in fear of them being used again. It is a permanent scar on the psyche of all who were children during the Cold War.
But at the time, in that context, using the morality of the day, it was going to happen. And we can look back and debate it today (or not debate, in the case of the OP).
But it happened. We spent 4 long years fighting a foe who gave every sign of not being willing to surrender. Who had a doctrine of “Fight to the last man, and the last man kills himself!” in their war methodology.
This, combined with the fact that bombing raids on Japan had already occured that caused equal damage, with higher fatalities, makes the use of the A-bomb kind of a no-brainer. Were gonzomax a soldier at the time, he would be just as grateful as the rest of them that he wasn’t going to have to face fanatical wave charges of defending soldiers and civilians.
Hell, there was a story that came out a while back about a guy who was at Hiroshima when the balloon went up. HE was horribly burned, but avoided radiation sickness. After getting bandaged, it took him 3 days to make his way to his new job position, where he reported to his boss and apologized for being late. His new job was at Nagasaki.
The mere fact that a non-fighting citizen survived a nuclear blast, then went to work immediately after the fact, should tell you all you need to know about the dedication and determination of the Japanese people. No WAY were they going to surrender without being forced to.
It was a bomb like any other bomb. Whether we used it to kill 100,000 civilians quickly or kill 100,000 in conventional ordinance bombing is indistinguishable except the horror of it would have been ongoing.
As to how history is portrayed your statement makes no sense. If Japanese school children are not taught about Pearl Harbor that is not comparable to how the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is portrayed. We do not hide the event. The fact that you feel it was unnecessary and cruel is a function of your opinion and does not bare up to the reality that this was a country that used school girls to build terror weapons and prisoners for live vivisections. They would have fought from island to island with the mindset that their own civilians should kill themselves rather than surrender. The death toll would have been substantial and the horrors of war would have ground on for months with no relief.
Yeah, you’re right - American history doesn’t even mention the use of atomic weapons.
No, wait, the other thing… you’re completely laughably ludicrously amazingly wrong.
I don’t find the argument “you have to judge them by the standards of the day” to be very compelling. By that argument, slavery wasn’t an awful thing until the public tide turned against it, at which point the slow-movers came to be in the wrong about it.
The error that people like Gonzomax make isn’t arguing with contemporary morality, it’s arguing with contemporary hindsight. The question isn’t whether Japan would have surrendered without the bombing. The question is how reasonable/moral the decision seemed at the time, when U.S. forces had fought Okinawa and Iwo Jima and seen the determination of the defenders; when they were aware that the Japanese were trying to negotiate a completely unacceptable surrender; when their collectively strong experience of fighting led them to project half a million casualties for their side alone in an invasion of the home islands, and when the horrors of atomic weapons beyond a really big boom were little known and less understood.
The decision to drop the atomic bombs wasn’t inarguable at the time, but you’re just being dogmatic if you can’t understand why the decision was made as it was without resorting to racism or bloody-mindedness as an explanation.
You are correct, I think I phrased that badly. Though, again, the majority of people *at the time[i/] didn’t think slavery was wrong. That was something that developed over time, and now we have that hindsight you mentioned. Which also applies here, to a much lesser extent (slavery being a larger moral issue, imo, than the decision to use a weapon of war in a war, especially in a way that will speed up or assure the end of said war).
I’ll have to agree with Dave Barry’s opinion on the original topic:
“It was Truman who made the difficult decision to drop the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the rationale being that only such a devastating, horrendous display of destructive power would convince Japan that it had to surrender. Truman also made the decision to drop the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the rationale being that, hey, we had another bomb.”
I also recall the same History prof I mentioned before mentioning that at the time, the two bombs were all we had. That if Japan still hadn’t surrendered after Nagasaki, it would have been a few months before we could have dropped another one.
And I am not sure if it was the same prof, another one, or another source, but I was told at one time that a known intelligence agent for the Japanese was “allowed” to witness the test in the American Southwest (he thought he was being sneaky and did not know they wanted him to see it), in hopes he would report this back to Tokyo, and the news would persuade them to give it up finally. Does anyone else here recall something like this?
Any discussion about this issue must take into account that the US or any of the scientists had no clue about fallout. At the time, it was thought that it would be one big explosion and that would be it so the idea that we intentionally did something that would KNOWINGLY lead to birth defects, high cancer rates, etc. is wrong.
MLEEs seems like the kind of person who accepts what he is taught. Ike and Macarthur were against it when they did it. Your logic does not explain why there were military and involved people ,who were very much against it. They were not 60 years later. Therefore, that criticism is baseless.
Japan was done. More than 60 cities had been leveled with conventional bombs. The island was blockaded. The Soviets were done in Europe and attacked Manchuria.
2… Intercepted messages said they were talking to the USSR to get a peace treaty. We knew that but rejected it demanding "unconditional surrender’. They wanted to retain the emperor.
Demonstrating the bomb on a nearby unpopulated island would have been sufficient.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of little military significance. They killed old men, women and children.
Some think we used it to justify the 2 billion spent on developing the bomb.
Some think we did it for USSR benefit. To show them what we were capable of. And that we were willing to use it.
Ike, Macarthur and even LeMay said it was unnecessary and unproductive.
Marshall predicted 25,000 casualties if we had to take the islands.
Truman said it would have been a million after a few months because the nation was torn by its use.
We have been taught what the government wanted us to learn.
gonzomax, could you give us a cite for your claims? Once again, I wouldn’t rely on MacArthur, considering the guy had a hardon for nuking China some six years later. So it wasn’t about being anti-nuke.
If you have a particular offline source (book or journal) in mind I’ll take a look. I’m pretty well read in this field and have never come across anything supporting the claim. So I’m not going to invest a lot of time into looking for a cite that I’m pretty sure isn’t there.
The USSR was buying time with the Japanese so it could build up their military in the Pacific to expand its territory or at least their sphere of influence in the region. Even when the Japanese did surrender, the USSR was complaining during the ratification of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951. The Soviets were still milking the end of the war with Japan six years after it ended, although they didn’t declare war against Japan until two days after Hiroshima. Your argument about a peace treaty with the USSR just doesn’t add up.
Let me try another angle for those you don’t understand the need to drop the bomb on Nagasaki.
August 6, 1945 - bombing of Hiroshima
Mokusatsu - no response from Japan
August 8 - USSR declares war
Mokusatsu - no response from Japan
August 9 - bombing of Nagasaki
Mokusatsu - no response from Japan, however internally the Japanese government agrees to surrender
August 14 - Emperor Hirohito announces to cabinet and records Gyokuon-hōsō
Kyūjō Incident begins
August 15 - two assassination attempts on PM Kantaro Suzuki
coup attempt on Emperor Hirohito
11:30am - the last attempt to prevent the broadcast of Gyokuon-hōsō
Kyūjō Incident ends
noon - Gyokuon-hōsō broadcast - Japan surrenders
To make it even shorter, after two nukes and a new military front opening up, there was still an attempt by some in the military to overthrow the government to keep the war going.
Gonzomax is not paying attention to any of the realities of the times or any of the realities of war. Nukes = bad in his worldview and all the firebombs and horrors of what war is will change his mind. We have provided abundant evidence why the bombs should have been dropped. That Hiroshima was wiped off the map and did not move them to surrender is telling. That Nagasaki got wiped off the map and a significant attempt to stop a surrender after that happened is of no matter to him.
These things are without doubt and are not disputed by anyone.
Gonzo apparently feels nukes are bad period. Never mind how many Americans and Japanese would die otherwise to end the war (by any reasonable count more than the nukes got and would include starvation and suicide not to mention bombs and guns). Never mind that Japan started the whole thing. Never mind that the Japanese back then, as a regime, were downright evil easily on par with the Nazis and arguably worse. Never mind that the Japanese just did not surrender as a cultural matter (Bushido code I think). Never mind more people died in the firebombings of Tokyo than the nukes got (as if that was a whole lot more pleasant than a nuke and is to say “non-nuke” war was quite capable of horrors easily on par with nukes).
This is mostly true. The USAAF had been reduced to bombing second and third rate cities because the major targets were pretty much gone. IIRC, the next planned step was going to be to (further) target their transportation infrastructure, something that would have led to (more) mass starvation. But the Soviets hadn’t attacked Manchuria yet. I believe they were planning to do so on August 15th but sped up their plans once we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima so managed to do it on August 9th instead.
The Foreign Ministry was pursuing a negotiated surrender through the USSR from July of '45. But it was largely an independent effort, with no significant outside support. The Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Sato, repeatedly told Foreign Minister Togo that it was a waste of time, that there was no point in “negotiating” while the government as a whole was still convinced that surrender was unnecessary and was committed to fighting on. But even if the government had committed to supporting negotiations, their position would have been entirely unrealistic. Even after the Nagasaki bombing, the military leadership continued to insist on their “absolute” requirements (no occupation, self-disarmament, Japanese trying of war criminals, retention of the imperial system). If that was their position after the two bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, it’s hard to imagine that they would have had more acceptable conditions in mind a month earlier.
There’s a moral argument to made for this, but I think that’s about it. Beyond the practical concerns (what if the bomb didn’t work, how do we get observers there, etc.) it would have made it very easy for the Japanese government to censor the news and/or deny that it wasn’t a trick in some way. There’s been some good scholarship done arguing that it took both the bombs and Soviet entry into the war to force Japanese capitulation. It’s difficult for me to accept that a demonstration alone would have done it. It just might have made our hands a little cleaner afterwards.
Yes and no. Hiroshima particularly had military significance as an important Army headquarters. But certainly the amount of destruction caused by the bombs meant that where they were dropped was fairly irrelevant; they were going to kill a lot of civilians.
That was a factor. The massive cost in developing the bomb did argue for using it.
Yes, this is an issue of controversy. I think the mainstream consensus among scholars at this point is that the effect of the bomb on the Soviets was a “bonus,” but not enough to alone cause use. There are still some revisionists who argue that it was more or less the sole reason for using the bomb, however.
I’m not really familiar with the LeMay quote, but for the quotes for the other two come years after the fact. MacArthur had personal reasons to be against the bombings (he was going to lead the invasion, after all) and later had personal reasons regarding his image in Japan to make it look like he had opposed the bombs on moral grounds.
We really have no idea how many casualties it was thought that an invasion would have taken. Truman asked for an estimate, but never got a real number. There are many conflicting contemporary studies. But I’m pretty sure that Marshall never suggested 25,000 casualties. That would only be a third of what it took to take Okinawa.
The details here are incorrect, but the basic argument (that the “it would have taken a million casualties to invade Japan” argument originated after the war) is true.
There’s some truth to this, I think. I think most Americans and most Japanese have only the most shallow understanding of the atomic bombings. And yes, in the years following the war the government and former officials of the Truman administration did what they could to influence the public to have the “correct” understanding.