I would like to point out that there was no way to drop the A-Bomb or any other bomb on a “purely military target” in WWII.
By the end of WWII in Europe the idea of “precision daylight bombing” only appeared in propaganda. Actual operations didn’t go that way.
A technique for city bombing was worked out that went like this. Two or more groups of bombers, depending on city size, carrying high explosive bombs would go first to create a lot of wreckage and scatter it about. That would be followed shortly thereafter by groups carrying incendiary bombs to set the wreckage on fire. And that would be followed by groups of bombers carrying anti-personnel fragmentation bombs to suppress fire-fighting. And firefighting was done by women, children and men unfit for military service. In some cases the bombers with fragmentation bombs were replaced by fighter planes straffing the target area.
If we are going to suggest alternatives they should be the ones that were technically and military possible at that time.
This is at best, hindsight. At worst, it’s historical revisionism. Japan still had a huge fighting force. This wasn’t the era of shock and awe. If you wanted to make an enemy capitulate, you had to go in and dig them out on the ground in a very bloody way.
The plans for the invasion of the Japanese mainland were well underway. It WOULD have happened had not the war been ended by the bomb.
As for just stopping the war and blockading Japan or something, that’s was totally unacceptable. Are you just going to let your thousands of prisoners of war rot? Are you going to agree to a negotiated cease-fire? Please. These were not realistic options. Under total war, both sides hammer at each other and kill as many people as possible until one side capitulates. That was the logic of war at the time. No one was about to let up on Japan and let them regroup, re-arm, build possible new weapons, or anything else.
I really hate to jump on you, elucidator, since I agree with you far more often than not, but this isn’t true and the Japanese were prepared to resist to the bitter end. There were 1,900,000 troops organized in 53 divisions, 23 mixed brigades, 3 security brigades and 2 tank divisions waiting in Japan for the invasion, along with 10,000 planes dedicated for use as kamikazes, to say nothing of the midget submarines, suicide motor boats (Shinyo) and suicide torpedoes (Kaiten) prepared for use. Japanese troops never surrendered in any appreciable numbers during the entire course of the war; they fought to the literal last man, preferring suicide to surrender. Even after the dropping of both atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was split 3-3 over surrender, with the civilians willing to give in and the military wanting to keep going on. The military ruled any actual decision, and it was only the personal intervention of Hirohito in favor of surrender that broke the deadlock.
I’d recommend Paul Fussel’s Thank God For the Atom Bomb (and an Afterward on Japanese Skulls) and Other Essays, the title isn’t ironic at all since he was an officer who fought in Europe and was slated for transfer to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. Incredibly cynical bastard, you’d probably really enjoy him. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in Second World War is also really good and probably much easier to hunt down.
David Simmons–Did you know anyone personally who might have been sent to participate in the invasion of the Japanese home islands? How did they feel about the bombs?
It was my understanding that the first 2 bombings were just test runs. Supposedly during the invasion the US was going to soften up the Japanese by repeatedly nuking them.(But we ramped down production of nuclear weapons when they gave up. If we continued along we could have produced 3-7 weapons per month starting in September. So a November invasion means anything between 9 and 21 more nuked cities.)
As a matter of fact, yes. Our group’s Martin B-26’s were replaced with Douglas A-26’s and we were just beginning training for transfer to the Pacific and when the war ended.
I’ll give you one guess as to how we took that news.
…And I’ll bet you just loved hearing elucidator tell you that Japan was ‘lying flat on its’ back’ and about as capable of fighting as the Black Knight.
Perhaps much of this thread, then, functions more as a commentary on how horrible war is than the specifics of the atomic bombings. More people were killed in the Tokyo firebombings than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? And from what I’ve heard, the carpet-bombing of Dresden was mostly a gesture of revenge, not a military necessity. Does the method in which they were killed make that much difference? Yes, the atomic bombs were unmistakeably frightening and destructive, which is why we’re talking about them - but that’s exactly what they were supposed to be…
I find the idea of announcing a demonstration in an unpopulated area untenable. At that point, the U.S. had exactly one successful test on their record. Had they made a big show of setting up a demonstration and had it failed for any number of annoying technical reasons, the U.S. would have lost a big chunk of credibility, not to mention wasting an A-bomb, supplies of which were not exactly abundant. Further, conducting the test only for a handful of Japanese government officials simply invites them to “spin” (to use a more modern term) the facts when they report back to Tokyo (i.e. it was a hoax, the explosion was due to thousands of tons of conventional explosives, etc). Detonating the bomb in a city creates tens of thousands of witnesses, and that’s a much more difficult thing for even a fascist government to conceal under propaganda.
The threat of “we’ve perfected this new technology and are prepared to keep using it until you surrender” has great strength. Of course, it was still something of a bluff, since the U.S. hadn’t perfected the technology and didn’t have a huge stockpile of A-bombs ready to go. Looking at Hiroshima/Nagasaki from a post-cold-war perspective is completely ridiculous.
Ironically, if the U.S. government was as callous and sadistic as some claim, it raises the question of why they didn’t use a nuke to win the Korean war. After all, Harry Truman was still President. On reflection, if Pyongyang had been clobbered and the communist government crushed, and the entire Korean penninsula was now under a relatively peaceful supercapitalist regime like modern South Korea, the world might be a lot better off.
Funny to think that if the bombs hadn’t been dropped, you probably wouldn’t be here to pose that query.
Did your father ever talk about why he loathed the Japanese so much? If I had witnessed suicide planes slamming into my friends’ boats in the Coral Sea, or run across the bodies of the hundreds of deluded Okinawan civilians who jumped off cliffs rather than surrender–all at the behest of what at that time was a hyper-militaristic, Emperor-worshiping society–I might have a bit of a visceral reaction. But visceral reactions aren’t necessarily wrong.
Of course you are ignoring the fact that the USSR was by that point Nuclear capable, and could have weighed in more than just the pilots and arms they did supply.
The operation was also a UN police action, in which many co operating nations would have not participated in had the bomb been used. You also ignore the fact that the major staging grounds for the US army was in Japan itself and the civilians were by that point very much against any use of Nuclear weapons (as they are to this day).
Of course MacArthur was ousted early in the conflict due to his butting heads with teh administration one of those issues actuallty being the use of atomic weapons on the Chinese.
It was those realities that prevented the US from using it again not some high moral idea.
Any nation in war is a base nation and it is then when the darkest part of our nature can shine.
Was it those realities, and not a high moral idea, though? This is an endless game of “heads I win, tails don’t count” slightly modified to:
[list][li]The U.S. commits an especially violent act in war, proving it is an evil nation.[/li][li]The U.S. doesn’t commit an especially violent act in war, which doesn’t prove that they’re not evil, just that something stopped them.[/li]
[/quote]
At heart of such a position is the unshakable (if not dogmatic) belief that the U.S. is evil, no matter what. It’s about as worthy of debate as any of the loopy conspiracy threads that pop up from time to time.
Oops, I wish I could go back in time and nuke that screwed-up formatting. I meant to say this, of course:
[ul][li]The U.S. commits an especially violent act in war, proving it is an evil nation.[/li][li]The U.S. doesn’t commit an especially violent act in war, which doesn’t prove that they’re not evil, just that something stopped them.[/li][/ul]
I think it’s too narrow to apply that ONLY to the US, Bryan. Yes, this topic is mostly about the US, but when was the last time anybody took the moral high ground in a war? That’s war. People do all the terrible things they can.
The book “Hiroshima’s Children” makes a pretty good point, I think. Japan was beaten. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that for sure, and neither did a good chunk of their military.
And we had a neat new toy to try out, and who knew when we’d have this opportunity again?
And while those in charge of making the decision may not have known how close to defeat and surrender Japan was, they had a decent idea.
Unfortunately, those same worthies were also very much aware of other fun things… like the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, and other testimonials to the Imperial Japanese idea of warfare.
The situation was not one we have really had to deal with ever SINCE then, at least not until certain groups thought that crashing airliners in the middle of major cities was a good idea. I think it’s kind of hard to judge without having BEEN there. We do have the benefit of hindsight, after all.
Aha! A chance to hijack this thread just a little and ride my favorite hobby horse; viz. the folly of waging preemptive war.
First off, the carpet bombing of Dresden was not in the least unusual. Once the limitations and uncertainties of aerial bombing were understood in WWII, carpet bombing became the standard operating procedure. See my post above.
Second. The bombing of Dresden was to a great extent the result of relying on intelligence data and analysis, as was all target selection. The Russians were closing in from the east, we and the British, Free French, Free Poles etc. were closing in from the west. Dresden was a target because it was considered an important transportation center connecting east, west and south. Interruption of east-west transportation was easy to understand. It prevented rapid transfer of troops and supplies between the two fronts, but why south? Well, because there was a strong belief, based on intelligence analysis, that the Germans had prepared a “National Redoubt” in the Alps to which their remaining forces could withdraw and prolong the war for a lengthy period. Interruption of transportation to the south could delay that presumed transfer of forces. General Bradley has written about how silly that sounds now but how strongly the belief was held at Allied command levels then.
When you are already actively engaged in a war you have to believe and act on your intelligence data. However before war starts and especially when planning on starting a war there are other avenues to gaining information about possible threats than your own, probably self-serving and overly pessimistic, assessment of the threat.
Japan may have been beaten, but it was going to be a very long time before we could defeat them fully.
Frighteningly enough, more or less the whole citizenry was apprently willing to die. People appear to have been resigned to their fates, and they themselves admit to this. Terrifying.