No. If you want to reduce the industrial capability, then you’re targeting factories, which is perfectly acceptable.
Targetting civilians, bomber Harris style, was supposed to break the enemies morale. However, it had the exact opposite effect as the flak crews were more concerned of “doing a good job” when they knew that their family’s lives were at stake.
Optihut, no offense, but your concept of how a naval blockade works is way off base.
The Unites States Navy had already formed a nearly complete blockade of Japan by 1945. It worked quite simply; they sank as many Japanese freighters as possible. This was normal practice in wartime; the Japanese and Germans had done the same when they had the opportunity.
But there’s no way to have distinguished between cargoes. Submarines could sink ships; they couldn’t surface and board them. And even if they could search them, what would have been the point? A freighter carrying rice today could be used to carry artillery shells next week, so sink it when you had the chance.
So saying we should have compelled Japan to surrender by continuing a naval blockade is saying we should have compelled Japan to surrender by letting millions of children starve to death. (No hyperbole; Japan already had established procedures by 1945 that gave soldiers a higher priority for food than children - soldiers were considered more useful to the war effort than children.) Undeniably, starvation would have eventually forced a Japanese collapse. But there’s no way it would have been more humane.
That’s the beauty of the “what if” game. Your scenario includes millions of children starving to death as a justification for an atomic bomb and I am of the opinion that neither starvation nor nuclear weapons would have been needed to reach a japanese surrender (the link with the quotations are enforcing that view).
Either way, since we’re playing “what if” I wonder whether anybody would rethink their view, if the first atomic bomb had been dropped on New York City. I for one wouldn’t and would still maintain my belief that using nuclear weapons is wrong.
Sure, SenorBeef has got a point that modern day sensibilty plays a big part for that point of view. But then again, the excuse “we had to drop the bomb, because it saved life.” is also modern day inspired, as it simply was not true back in the day.
Targeting factories and actually having them be all or even mostly what was hit was impossibility in World War II. The reason Harris gave up on trying to hit anything smaller than a city was because cities were the only thing that could reliably be hit with the technology of the time. Early on in the night bombing of Germany, only one bomber in three was dropping its bombs within 5 miles of its target. Daylight bombing was more accurate that that, of course, but it never was anything close to precise. Pretty much every time heavy bombers were used to carpet bomb enemy positions on the front line, large numbers of friendly fire casualties from short bombs resulted, even when the distance between the combatants was half a mile.
Japan was already in the early stages of starvation by the time the atomic bombs were dropped. Japan’s merchant fleet had dropped from a prewar total of 6 million tons of shipping to under 2 million. A large part of what was left was small vessels under 500 tons which were being sunk by submarine’s deck guns because they weren’t worth a torpedo. The effect of being cut off from the oil in the Dutch East Indies was being felt and had been for some time. Flight training for pilots dropped constantly during the war due to fuel shortages and was down to 10 hours or less where it had been in the hundred prior to the war. When the battleship Yamato was sent on a special attack (i.e. suicide) mission to Okinawa, it was ordered to be sent with only enough fuel for a one-way trip.* There were still 10,000 planes designated to be used for kamikaze missions when the invasion of Japan came, and there was enough fuel for them to be used on one-way flights. Japanese soldiers proved willing to fight on when slowly starving to death as early as 1942 at Guadalcanal, and continued to do so throughout the war.
Despite this, Japan continued to fight on, even though its position was entirely hopeless and had been for some time – since mid 1944 at the least. Japan never planned on winning the war from day one. The plan was that Japan would seize the resources of East Asia, build a string of bases in the Pacific which America would bleed trying to recover. The underlying assumption was that the US public in its decadence wouldn’t stand for heavy casualties.
*The order was disobeyed and it was sent with enough fuel for a return trip.
@Apos: The only part of the US taking over Japan’s biological weapons programmed that’s a conspiracy was their use in North Korea. Unit 731 is well documented, as is the deal that was cut to exchange the hard data for not pursuing war crimes. The embarrassing bit was that when China and North Korea claimed that US planes were dropping biological weapons during the Korean War, the evidence they produced were bombs that Japan had dropped on the Chinese during World War II.
Optihut, I read the quotes you linked to. You should be aware of the context in which they were made. In the years following the war, there was a big public demand for reduction of conventional military strength. The argument was the America had the bomb, so we didn’t need a big expensive army and navy. Most of the generals and admirals who are quoted as downplaying the role of the atom bomb in ending the war were trying to make the case that a conventional army and navy was still needed.
And while you may have the opinion that starvation wouldn’t have occurred in Japan in the wake of an ongoing blockade, the fact is that by the summer of 1945 people in Japan were already dying of starvation. The Japanese government knew this and had formed plans on who would get food and who would be denied it as supplies were reduced.
As for seeing New York bombed, obviously it would have been a bad thing. And the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bad things. But the alternatives were worse. In my opinion, it’s better to end a war by killing 100,000 with a bomb than kill 1,000,000 by starvation.
As it turned out he was exactly right. Admiral Yamamoto went to school in the United States and he well knew our industrial capacity. As such he was resistant to attacking the US but like any good soldier he did what he was ordered to do. Even though he was the enemy I have a great deal of respect for that man.
I see. So killing workers has no bearing whatsoever on industrial production?
**
Even with the bombs, the surrender was very precarious. I’m still not buying the idea that they were jumping at the chance to surrender, but we bombed them anyway and stomped on their kittens.
Oh, I don’t believe the “we had to drop the bomb, because it saved life.” thing was in the minds of those in charge. Not Japanese lives, anyway. They were concerned with saving American lives, and any way to bring an end to the war without taking massive casualties was going to be used.
It just happens that there is a side benefit that life was saved - American and Japanese. I don’t think you have a grasp on the desperation of the Japanese people at the time. Most of them - or at least a LOT of them - were exceedingly tenacious in a way that I don’t think we (myself included) can really understand.
Their sense of honor, pride, and religion dictated that they should fight to the last man and die to fight us. Women and children were being trained to fight with sharp sticks, by the millions. Had we had to invade, with our fire support supremecy, supply supremecy, and superior equipment and troops, we would’ve been forced to kill aggressive women, children, old people, etc. in self defense, along with the million or so regular army troops there.
Previous battles had already proved their tenacity - and they were fighting for rocks out in the Pacific, not their sacred homeland. Women and children, turned combatants, would have died by the millions - both by direct combat and by suicide. The invasion, persued so zealously, could’ve possibly basically spelled the end of Japan as a nation.
As tragic as the 300k deaths the atomic bombs caused were, it was absolutely nothing compared to the eridication of the Japanese people that quite possibly would’ve happened had we invaded. In the end, it saved Japanese lives, as well as American ones.
To Optihut:
To reinforce SenorBeef’s well written post I want to add that it seems you are playing the ‘What If’ game more than anyone else is. Back somewhere in this thread I listed some things we knew about the Japanese. They DID fight to the last man (or so close as to make no difference). Women DID throw themselves from cliffs, holding children no less, rather than be captured by Americans. The populace WAS being trained to fight any invasion. Civilians WERE starving to death towards the end and it ONLY would have gotten worse. Even at the very end the miltray attempted a coup to AVOID surrender and they came damn close to succeeding.
Your whole premise is a ‘What If’ and only if you are given every benefit of the doubt does your premise that dropping the a-bombs was a crime hold water and even then it’s somewhat of a strecth to call it a crime. Unfortunately you simply can’t be given the benefit of the doubt as the facts argue against it over and over. You need to suppose that the Japanese go through some sort of magical transition to become a docile people overnight.
Your attitude seems more of the knee-jerk crowd that all nukes are bad. Period. End of story. Anyone who uses them is a criminal irrespective of circumstances.
To me it rather seems that you guys believe the atomic bomb actually caused that “magical transition”. If I am intend on fighting to the last man, then nothing is going to change that. So the Japanese were ready to surrender, irrespective of an a-bomb.
I guess I can agree with the assessment of my position: Nukes are bad. Period. End of story.
Besides, even in that case, I don’t believe the circumstances warranted using nuclear weapons, but that’s because my evaluation of the situation is different. Sure, if the nuclear bomb would indeed - magically as you mentioned - turn people from the mindset to fight to the last man to surrender, then I guess I’d grudgingly agree with it. However, that reasoning still sounds like a huge load of BS to me.
Even with the dropping of two atomic bombs and the loss of Manchuria to the USSR, the Japanese cabinet was still divided on the issue of surrender. It was a 3-3 deadlock, with the civilians willing to give up the ghost and the military insisting that the war continue. It was only the intervention of Hirohito that broke the deadlock in favor of surrender. Hirohito’s own words:
A link to his full address announcing the end of the war is here:
Acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration
Something to note is that nowhere in the speech does Hirohito use the word ‘surrender’ - it took a few moments for it to sink in to those hearing the speech that it actually meant surrender.
A bit of an aside about Yamamoto – he was a target for assassination by extremists in the army for his opposition to the invasion of Manchuria in particular and the army’s plan for expansion by conquest in general.
Through the magic of well, Magic, we knew that
they had figured out where we were coming
they were planning to fight it out there with eve
Through the magic of well, Magic, we knew that
they had figured out where we were coming
they were planning to fight it out there with eve
err
the Japanese had moved a lot of materiel to the target zones
they were planning to fight it out to the bloody end
the conditions of a negotiated peace that some within the Japanese government were proposing would be unacceptable to the US (self disarmament, no occupation, etc)
such peace feelers as some ambassadors had sent out had been repudiated by the Japanese government internally, with criticism for the ambassadors who proposed them
In addition, although factions of both the Air Force (err Air Corps) and Navy felt that bombardment, mining, and blockades would force the Japanese to surrender there was no certainty as to either the truth of those claims nor the timetable. War weariness was definitely a concern - there were some fears that a prolonged blockade might lead to a negotiated peace, and we were loathe to leave the job half done ( a la Germany after World War I). The fact that a prolonged war would amplify the role of the Soviets would play only exacerbated such concerns)
On a slightly different topic, both the Germans and the Japanese did feel that bombing (German and Japanese) civilians was a war crime. The Japanese certainly prosecuted and executed a number of downed flyers. The Germans made a lot of propoganda noise about the Americans being the racist destroyers of western civilization, and IIRC there were some informal lynchings/killings of downed bomber crews by German civilians, although that cannot be laid at the hands of the German government I suppose. I guess the Germans and the Japanese were able to discern a clear cut difference between bombing Guernica/Warsaw/Rotterdam/Moscow/Nanking/Shanghai and bombing Berlin or Tokyo.
Execution was sometimes a bit of an easy way out of this mortal coil:
Vivisection of Prisoners of War
My main point in bringing up this nastiness is that the war against Japan was fought on a level of debauchery that is hard to understand sixty years after the fact. Quarter was rarely given or accepted, as the consequences of it were well understood by both sides. I of course don’t mean to imply that Japanese prisoners were vivisected, but they were running a very extreme risk of being shot out of hand; understandably. Once the wounded of one side chooses to throw hand grenades at those trying to bring them medical aid, all bets are off – very unfortunately, but such is the world. For instance, it was common practice on both sides to shoot survivors from sunken ships. Parallels to the Eastern Front, while a bit off and easy to exaggerate, are closer to how he US and Japan regarded each other than how the US and Germany regarded each other.