And even on this very board, the bastion of tolerance, on the thread the day that 9/11 happened we had otherwise reasonable posters talking about “killing them all” and turned places into “glass parking lots.” No need to reopen old wounds and its all on here.
Now, imagine 9/11 and for the next four years you open the newspaper and read about 1,000 dead Americans each WEEK. Then you read about how Afghanistan is nearly defeated, but they start kamikaze attacks. Read about how they brutally execute thousands of our prisoners of war. Read about how they refuse to surrender on remote islands and force our troops to kill them all because they won’t surrender and keep firing.
After four years of that, would anyone here have any qualms about dropping a nuke? Or do we tell the civilians that we must continue the course so as not to offend future generations who we have no idea would be offended?
The Allies allowed a powerless figurehead Emperor - which would be preferable to a third bomb and the ongoing war in anyone’s book. Axis fascism was crushed, totally and utterly as an example for the rest of the world. That’s not to say that other problems didn’t crop up, but we put that particular one down with devastating finality and tremendous effort.
I’m with Little Nemo on the second point, the United States and Britain were not remotely equivalent to the Axis. Good Guy United States, has most powerful weapon ever devised to itself and decides to rebuild Europe. They had their problems sure, but waging aggressive wars of extermination was not one of them. As for the USSR, that was a deal with the devil we had to take. Even arch-Bolshevik haters like Churchill recognised that Hitler posed a far greater threat to world peace than Stalin. Besides which, the combined forces of the United States and her industrial might along with bankrupt Britain and her Dominions could not have taken down Stalinist Russia.
I think in the distant future historians will be in awe of how the USA behaved post WWII when it came to its “enemies”. And, IMO, for that matter, the amount of handwringing and discussions about how to use the bomb or not at the end by various people in power makes me proud to be an American.
The end WWII was the Apollo 13 of history. Bad shit was going down and in the end the best of what makes America best bubbled to the top when it counted.
I agree. However, I repeat my question. Was it really worth hundreds of thousands of deaths to obtain a few thousand war crimes convictions? Did you know, for example, that General MacArthur granted immunity to Shiro Ishii and other members of Unit 731 in return for information on germ warfare, which was obtained through human experimentation? Was this justice?
I agree, but some of our history is very black indeed. Such as British and US use of concentration camps in the Boer and Philippine–American wars.
The US certainly deserves credit for implementing the Marshall Plan. However, it wasn’t purely altruistic. It’s stated aim was to prevent the spread of communism in Europe.
Again, I agree.
Who takes offence is of no importance. It’s about the deaths of thousands of people, some of whom died in prolonged agony, which could perhaps have been prevented. At the very least, it’s worth reflecting on.
I think that’s true, and should be remembered. But some of the worst bubbled up too, and that shouldn’t be forgotten either. I don’t have a problem with patriotism as such, the celebration of the best a country can produce. But it becomes facile and unhealthy when anything at odds with the image being projected is swept under the carpet.
Whose sweeping? Most of what I’m seeing in this thread is explaining.
I seem to recall one poster here talking about Japanese education about WWII. Which apparently was something along the lines of some things happened and then they nuked our asses. Now THATS some sweeping.
To be honest, yes. In my opinion, it would have just been adding insult to injury (a horribly pedestrian term for the horrors inflicted in that place, I know) to throw away the data gathered. It should never have happened but we can’t make it un-happen by not trying to extract some good from the data. I’m aware of the argument that using the data risks it happening again, but I don’t think that’s a concern - if it was going to happen it would, because they wouldn’t plan on getting caught and the data seized.
What people have been saying here doesn’t stem from patriotism, it stems from a considered evaluation of the events of the time. No one has been saying “My country right or wrong”, we’ve been saying “for once we did the right thing”.
It was if it served as a deterrent against other war crimes.
True. But we’re not talking about general American history here. We were talking about a very specific situation.
I’ve already said that under other circumstances bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been immoral. But given the actual circumstances in which they were bombed, it was the more moral (or less immoral if you prefer) course of action.
If I were Truman, I wouldn’t even go into morality. With a decade of depression and four years of war, the choice would have been easy. And looming on the horizon was Stalin and a volatile China. The Allies basically settled on a strategy of Carthaginian peace with the Axis. Yes, nuke all of them into surrendering. And yes, the Romans nuked Cathage in a manner of speaking. They smashed the structures and salted the fields.
Yes, but no Chinese had any say in the droppage of atomic weapons.
Nor was there very much empathy for China’s plight anywhere outside of China beyond maybe the British, who might have gone “Oi ! That’s ours, chaps, what ! Find your own dastardly slanty-eyed devils to steal a country from, you… dastardly slanty-eyed devils !”. And even *after *Pearl Harbour, were the various foreign volunteer brigades motivated by saving the Chinese… or “sticking it to the Japs” any way they could ? I don’t *know *either way for sure, but I do know that the Flying Tigers didn’t fly nor tige in 1940…
So, at the risk of repeating myself, implying that 8 years of warfare in China and/or Japanese exactions committed on Chinese people had taken a toll on the American psyche, that it made Americans more callous when it came time to drop the bomb isn’t quite right IMO.
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And it went on after 1940, too! backatcha
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Of course it did ! The Germans were nicking all the potatoes and drinking all the plonk. Ghastly times.
The US was very limited in what it could do for the Chinese because of laws requiring neutrality. That didn’t an extensive propaganda campaign in the US through Luce’s Time and Life and other people’s efforts. The public knew about the atrocities in China, and the US embargo of oil against Japan (we were the big producer then) forced the expansionist Japanese to attempt to secure a supply in Southeast Asia, leading directly to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the war. The embargo was FDR’s baby. I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again here, FDR begged, borrowed, stole and lied to get the US in the war in Europe, and he did a lot in the Pacific too.
Google Operation Starvation, the name for the aerial mining of littoral Japanese waters. It was murderously effective. This Rand Corporation report (.pdf) on the Operation, goes into more detail. Go to page 52 of the document for the effects. They cite the Strategic Bombing Survey, which notes that average caloric intake in Japan for the summer of 1945 was 1680 calories per person. This includes vital workers like miners and industrial workers, which were better fed than the populace at large. The author notes that the populace was at or below the subsistence level. Moreover, the total caloric intake was nutritionally unbalanced, ‘with corresponding low disease resistance and an increase in deficiency diseases’. (Page 56.)
It would have been a brutal, horrific winter had the Allies not invaded.
There is a table on the size of the Japanese merchant fleet here and a table on Japanese rice supply here, note particularly the precipitous drop in both domestic production and importation in 1944 and especially 1945.
The B-29s are remembered for the bombing campaign (though on preview I see that Gray Ghost has scooped me a bit); but at the Navy’s insistence some were diverted to the mining of Japanese harbors which turned out to be highly successful. Though it is just the name of the operation, it doesn’t leave much to the imagination: Operation Starvation
This thread made me go back and reread Paul Fussel’s Thank God for the Atom Bomb (it’s here as a pdf pile). Something he said on the matter:
Something that really added to the problem even post-war was the influx of population from the army returning home from overseas and repatriation of Japanese civilians from places such as Korea and Formosa combined with the lack of housing as a result of the bombing.
The best judgment of the people in the best position to make the decision. In this case, the participants in the Casablanca Conference.
Well, in your scenario, the Allies make peace with Japan in 1944. The military government remains in power. We can only guess at what comes next, but I doubt it would be liberal reform.
In history, the Allies remake Japan into a disarmed, liberal, modern democracy. The new constitution you credit was crafted under Allied supervision and heavily based on Allied political thought.
You’re proposing a peace settlement in 1944. The Trinity test wasn’t until July of 1945. How, then, would it have influenced a peace settlement?
I can understand a country willing to use the atomic bomb if Japan could not retaliate. But let’s speculate a bit and look at the current global scene. Would it be advisable for Israel to use the bomb in the Middle East in a pre-emptive strike. I suppose your answer would be no because probably all h_ll would break-out and there would be substantial loss of life by warring nations.
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backatcha 
