Don’t underestimate the American hatred for the Japanese.
“Before we’re done with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell!”
Admiral William Frederick Halsey Jr.
After the waves of firebombings, I think many Japanese were convinced that the Americans wanted to exterminate them as a race.
According to the Time article, Truman was prepared to drop as many as four nukes. The cities in the “special list” that were thus far spared from bombing were Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyokusuka, Niigata, (can’t remember the rest.)
The article also mentioned that polls in the US showed the majority of Americans wanted the war with Japan fought to a decisive conclusion, rather than accept surrender terms before the Okinawa invasion.
Simple perhaps, but is it sufficient ? By that moral system, wouldn’t negotiating a conditional surrender instead of attacking until they accepted an unconditional one have been the right thing since it would have killed fewer people ? Or besieging Japan, torpedoing Marus until attrition of resources leads to their giving up (although admittedly, that would have taken quite a bit longer) ?
Seems you’re now moving from “it was the right thing to do” to “the little bastards deserved it” or “they did way worse”. I got no problem with that, but that’s hardly the same argument.
Let me be clear: I’m not condemning the use of atomic weapons or defending the idea that it was an abominable crime (or rather, more abominable than other civilian bombings). I think it was in line with how the rest of the war went. It might even conceivably have been the lesser evil in retrospect. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what I think - it happened, and that’s that.
But when people say it was “the right thing to do” to drop them, I do get curious about the moral framework that leads them to that determination, that’s all. I think it’s interesting to explore that.
The feeling was mutual. John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War is a good read on the subject.
In fairness, Japan had a good reason to hate America. America forcing Japan to end sakoku at gunpoint wasn’t exactly polite. Hell, if Matthew Perry had left Japan alone and let sakoku continue, Japan might not even have gotten involved in WWII, preferring its isolation.
It’s not an absolute rule. More of a guideline. But when you’ve got a Plan A that kills 2,000,000 people and a Plan B that kills 200,000 people, you need to have some really good reasons for choosing Plan A.
Besieging Japan was not a better plan. Terms like siege and blockade sound nicer than bombing but the way they actually work is you cut off the supplies of things like food that people need to stay alive. Maintaining a siege would have meant sitting back until enough Japanese had died of starvation to cause the country to collapse. Destroying two cities is more moral than destroying an entire nation.
A conditional surrender might have been theoretically possible but the Japanese government wasn’t interested in any reasonable conditions. They wanted to hold on to Japan, keep their army and navy intact, maintain their existing government, and even keep most of the territory they had conquered. 1945 was a little late for Japan to offer to call the war a tie. And realistically, such a “peace” would have been only a temporary truce and another war would have been fought.
I’m still saying that the dropping of the two nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was the “right thing to do”. Those acts helped end WWII more quickly than would have been possible without using them. Dropping those bombs saved many, many, many lives.
This thread is just as sinful.
That is to say, not sinful at all.
The second bomb was ‘needed’ in the sense that I don’t think Japan’s military would have willingly surrendered otherwise (and even after the second bomb it was touch-and-go for a while).
The only point I make when this topic comes up is that people vastly, grossly over-estimate the number of causalties that would have resulted from a ground invasion of Japan’s mainland. Japan was toast. They had no weapons, they had no metals left over to make more weapons (my grandmother-in-law talks about how the army came around and confiscated basically any metal objects in the house).
With practically every able-bodied male over the age of 15 or so already in the military, the ‘defense of the homeland’ was going to be taken on by women and old men armed with shovels and bamboo sticks…and these weren’t soldiers willing to fly planes into ships etc, these were ordinary civilians. I personally think the number of deaths would have been far, far lower than people estimated at the time.
HIndsight and perfect eyesight, etc etc, but in one respect one of the worst outcomes of the bomb was it has allowed Japan to portray itself as one of the ‘victims’ of WWI, something that obviously doesn’t go down very well with the rest of the region.
I wasn’t thinking about *that *strict a siege (not the least because shore fishing is typically done within the range of coastal batteries, so interdiction there wouldn’t have been a zero risk proposition. Also because there’d have been just too many wooden junks to make a sizeable dent. Plus, y’know, killing civilian fishermen and inducing starvation on a massive level is indeed *probably *not cool :)). More like completely isolating the isles from industrial-scale foreign trade - the very foreign goods that had made them consider conquest necessary in the first place. No steel for you, no rubber, no luxury goods, no oil or coal, no electronics, no cotton… “play ball or enjoy going back to playing samurais”, basically.
Yeah, possibly so.
But I’m not sure the atomic bombs were the only way, or the “least amount of force” way if you prefer, to let them (and their population) understand the clear and present need to be cutting the shit. **Sevencl **mentions Perry’s black ships, which indeed had a tremendous effect (not to mention put a tremendous fright) on Japan earlier in history - and they didn’t even need to fire a shot. A day or two of naval shelling/air raids straight at Hirohito’s palace, coming from an armada of ships parked in full view of the shore, might have gotten the message across for example.
That, we can’t know.
The question isn’t one that should be asked in a vacuum, out of context, and that is my chief complaint about this question that pops up all the time. What were the alternatives, and was this the best course of action among the alternatives? That is the only way to assess this.
“Should I be driving 75 on the highway with a 55 MPH speed limit?”
“No!”
“Should I be driving 75 on the highway with a 55 MPH speed limit if my wife is in the car having a heart attack and we are going to the hospital?”
“Yes!”
Should be use an atomic bomb on a Japanese city and kill 60,000 to 80,000 civilians?
“No!”
Should be use an atomic bomb on a Japanese city and kill 60,000 to 80,000 civilians to end a war that had already killed 75 million people when the invasion alternative will kill 4 to 5 million?"
“Yes!”
I enjoy reading your Devil’s advocacy, but this is being naive to the situation. That strict of a siege was already happening; even with wartime construction Japan was down to 23% of its prewar shipping, much of that being smaller coastal vessels. The Japanese population was already facing starvation. The Japanese military leadership was undeterred.
WW2 was a total war. Nobody was interested in using the least amount of force, quite the opposite.
Again, I appreciate the Devil’s advocacy but this is being hopelessly naive. Entire cities were being burned to the ground and US battleships were already shelling Japan’s coastal areas; Japan had no navy worth the name left. Tokyo had been burned to the ground around Hirohito’s palace. None of this had gotten the message across to ultranationalists in power in Japan, who were prepared for national suicide before giving in.
No, this isn’t true. Postwar surveys in Japan found that that the Japanese were much better prepared for resisting an invasion than the American planners had realized during the war. The Japanese had been withdrawing equipment from the frontlines and building up stockpiles in Japan. (The Americans saw that the Japanese were running low on the frontlines and mistakenly assumed this meant Japan was running low on equipment so their estimates were off on the amount of resistance they would face in Japan.) The Japanese also took a risk and built up their heaviest defenses where they guessed the Americans would invade - and they guessed right. The Americans were going to attack exactly where the Japanese were expecting and were most ready to fight. So the Americans almost certainly underestimated how many casualties the invasion would cause.
So you and all those other advocates of “It shortened the war and spared lives that would have been lost had we invaded”.
Basically you are all right with making civilians a target during war.
You are apparently OK with Germany bombing London.
Hell, the Germans should have started bombing civilian targets right away!
Think of the all the lives that could have been spared if Britain had signed peace in 1940.
Yes. In a total war that had already killed 50 million civilians, I’d support killing 80,000 more via bombing thereby stopping the war, vice the alternative of a invasion that would have killed 4 million more civilians and many more military.
Absolutely.
What sane man wouldn’t?
Again. What was the better alternative???
As far as I know, this is incorrect. There were 900,000 soldiers brought back from the IJA in China for the defense of the home islands, along with local levies. While these troops would have been considered inferior to the same number at the start of the war, they were still members of the military and generally equipped as such. They had 14 divisions manned and fully equipped, including three tank brigades. They were far from toast, and American war planners at that point had a pretty good idea of how these things would go.
Did… did you really just say we should’ve made peace with the nazis? You know, those wacky guys with the awesome uniforms, European conquest and genocidal ambitions?
As for civilians - read this: Bloggen som hedrar Steven Den Beste genom anime- och filmrecensioner
I don’t see how the atomic and conventional bombing of Japanese civilians can be considered as anything other than an atrocity. The suffering caused is truly unimaginable. However, that’s one of the tragedies of war, it’s quite possible there was no moral option available. If the allies launched a conventional invasion, there would have been millions of casualties. Japan could have been blockaded, but that could have resulted in mass starvation. The allies couldn’t simply declare themselves the winners and go home, due to the thousands of POWs held by the Japanese and their occupation of China and Korea.
In a saner world, the Pacific War would have ended in 1944 through a negotiated peace, when it became obvious that Japan’s defeat was inevitable. I believe the allied leaders should have pursued this option rather than insisting on unconditional surrender. In an even saner world, the war would not have been fought at all.
Possibly, but it’s the Japanese leadership who were the most culpable. Instead of protecting their people, they were already preparing to sacrifice a large proportion of them in the defence of the home islands.
I assume what would make this fantasy world saner would be the Japanese being capable of reason, as opposed to willing to fight to the last man and woman? Because the Allied leaders weren’t demanding unconditional surrender just to be dicks.
Thanks for the clarification. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, and don’t know enough of British governmental history to say one way or the other. The wiki on the 1945 election is pretty emphatic that a major plank of Labour’s platform was instituting the cradle-to-grave welfare state. I can see your point about relevancy and importance, and it’s one I’ll need to think on more.
I did find it funny when I first read it, that Churchill leads Britain 99% of the way to the finish line, and ends up getting voted out of office two weeks before the bombings we’re discussing in this thread. No good deed goes unpunished…