So now, Oliver Stone is going to make a series “proving” that the U.S. didn’t have to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. After that guy’s ridiculous movie JFK, I don’t bother with his historical views anymore.
There’s endless debate on whether the U.S. was justified in dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Opinions seem to be split down the middle, I’d estimate. “It was an atrocity to bomb Hiroshima,” versus “The Hiroshima bomb shortened the war and saved lives by preventing an American invasion of Japan.”
What I never hear however, is opinions about the bombing of Nagasaki. If bringing the war to a swift conclusion was the purpose of bombing Hiroshima, why didn’t the U.S. hold back a bit to see the Japanese reaction? Wasn’t going ahead and bombing Nagasaki, excuse the expression, overkill?
I happen to think that the bombing of Hiroshima probably did spare the U.S. and the Japanese an invasion. Therefore, I’m somewhat ambivelent about it. But Nagasaki is harder for me to defend. And I’m a little surprised that this isn’t more discussed when the subject comes up.
Good lord, no. Treatment of black slaves, of Chinese immigrants working on the railroads, of the native americans in general (not getting into accidentally releasing a smallpox plague on them), and treatment of Japanese people in America during WWII were greater sins in my mind.
We were at war. We bombed Hiroshima because we could. We told them to surrender. They didn’t. We bombed Nagasaki. We told them to surrender. They said OK, sounds good to us.
Some people would rather we launched fire-bombing raids, which would have killed more people, than set off two bombs. I just don’t get that.
Agreed. The government at the time made the right choice.
People who argue that we should have invaded the old fashioned way disgust me. It would have cost thousands of American lives. Yes, soldiers know what they’re signing up for (though conscripts didn’t even get that choice), but we have no right to throw their lives away when alternatives exist. Soldiers are people doing a job to live and support their families like everyone else, and are not expendable.
The OP seems to be of the opinion that the Japanese didn’t respond because they didn’t have time. I disagree. They chose not to respond. In fact, they chose not to respond to the second bombing as well. That is, the people who held the power chose to do nothing, despite having ample evidence of the hopelessness of their situation, and the counsel of others (who weren’t empowered to make the call) that it was time to give it up.
And frankly, it was time to give it up long before the two bombs were dropped. The war had been an almost unbroken string of disastrous defeats for almost 3 years, and many of their major cities had been burned to the ground. The bombs were useful for their shock value, and not particularly for their destructive power. The Japanese high command had to be shaken up, badly, before they would change course.
And even the second bomb didn’t do it. They were still gonna sit on their asses planning the glorious death of the whole nation, until the emperor intervened and ordered a surrender. Had that not happened, who knows how long the war would have lasted?
And even then, the Emperor had to twist some arms in a completely unprecented way, for Japanese Emperors. Many of his generals wanted to hold out in a heroic last stand against the invaders. Civilians male and female were being drilled as a militia and, since there were not enough rifles to go around, they were drilling with spears. If they had had to stand against an Allied ground-invasion of the Home Islands, the gutters would have flowed and surged with Japanese blood.
Forgot to mention: neither atomic bomb was a “sin”, certainly not any more a sin than bombing cities with any kind of bombs. If anything, it is arguable that the atomic bombs were a “blessing”, sparing the US and Japan hundred of thousands or even millions more casualties. But being an atheist myself, I would prefer not to use either term.
The point of bombing Nagasaki from the U.S. perspective was mainly to prove to Russia that we had more than one bomb. So unless we can have a time machine where we could know for sure Russia’s possible expansionist reaction to knowing we were out of nukes, there really is not a way to resolve whether bombing Nagasaki saved a net amount of lives compared to the alternative.
In previous threads on this topic, we’ve established through various sources that, in the cabinet meetings following the bombing of Hiroshima, the cabinet knew it was an atomic bomb. The emperor was convinced that unconditional surrender was necessary at that point, but the Army wasn’t, and it continued to hold out for plainly unacceptable conditional surrender terms (like ‘no foreign occupation of Japan’), even after Russia declared war on Japan.
It wasn’t until after Nagasaki that the Army acceded to accepting the Potsdam Declaration. And even then, a faction of the IJA attempted a coup to prevent surrender from happening.
I dunno, but they had been copying every other Western technology since the Meiji Restoration, why not gutters? (Even assuming there were none in pre-Meiji Japan, which, again, I dunno.)
Actually, I remember reading somewhere, (and I can’t remember where, some trivia book of mine,) that the second bombing was because of a translation error in communications. The Japanese response to the call for surrender was “We will consider your demand for surrender,” meaning “we’ll get back to you.” The response was accidently translated as “We will ignore your demand for surrender”. I don’t know how accurate this claim is. I’ve only seen it put forward once, but I haven’t read too much about the bombings. That’s true.
It’s disingenuous to call it a U.S. “sin” anyway. The UK and US had an agreement that neither would use nukes without the other party’s agreement, and Churchill was completely behind both bombings.
WWII is about the only time in recent history that the US or UK can be proud of their conduct in a necessary, just war. I don’t get why people keep trying to diminish the heroism of everyone involved. You can’t even plead ignorance, everyone knows this stuff.
Do you have a cite for this? I have never seen any suggestion at all that the UK had a veto power over the US using the bomb, and I’ve read a lot of WWII history.
By the way, I used the term “sin” as in “greater sin”. It’s purely semantic, and I don’t mean to invoke god or whatever. Call it “the worse evil” if you want to.
Mokusatsu - to ignore, or to treat in silent contempt.
Even after Nagasaki there was a coup attempt to keep the war going. The only sin was on the part of the Japanese nationalists for wasting so many lives in a futile struggle.
Even if true, the Potsdam declaration ordered them to surrender immediately. No deliberating, no quibbling, no negotiation. Surrender now or be destroyed. So even if the response had been “let us think about it”, that’s not what they were told to do. The Japanese leaders risked total destruction of their entire country by sending an ambiguous response just as much as with a refusal (if that anecdote were true).
Thanks for that. I looked it up. I had no idea it existed. It might be an interesting thread to discuss what might have happened had Churchill objected to the bombing, but I also found a bit of his autobiography that said he never gave so much as a second thought as to whether it should be used, and no one else he was conferring with did either.