It was perhaps even more legitimate for Japan because much of the manufacturing (including of war materiel) was still done in small workshops scattered all over the cities. While inefficient in many ways, this effectively protected against any attempts at precision bombing, and area bombing was the only way to damage dispersed production.
I also think we need to be careful about being judgmental on historical events using our current perspectives. There are many things that were acceptable even 20 or 30 years ago that we won’t dream of doing now. So judging events from 70 years ago with our social mores of today is problematic. Even with that suppose that WWII was being fought now:
It’s 2014, and we’ve (the US) been at war with Germany and Japan since 2011. We expect when this war is over that over 990,000 American service members will be killed, with potentially double that as causalities when we invade Japan.
Keep in mind that it was only back in 1988 that we fought World War I. And while the US was only at war for only about 18 months, over 400,000 Service members were killed then.
We’ve had two world wars over the last two generations with massive causalities. The rest of the world lost even more. And we don’t know when we’ll get an email telling us that our son, brother or father was killed.
Were the fire bombings of Japan wrong from our perspective now? Yes I think they clearly were. We don’t have pin point munitions that we have now either so that isn’t an option. And after three of four years, we want this to stop once, and hopefully for all.
Don’t whitewash what was done with poor attempts at excuses like this; the specific target of the firebombing was the most densely populated urban areas of Japan’s cities, whose houses of paper and wood would burn more easily than European civilian housing. It was an extremely horrible war, setting hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians on fire was the specific intent of these missions; no one pretended otherwise at the time. From the US Strategic Bombing Survey, bolding mine:
In what possible way is this “more legitimate” for Japan than ‘dehousing’ and killing the German civilian industrial workforce to disrupt Germany’s wartime economy was?
Nope; you’re wrong, wrong, and wrong. The post was not a “whitewash” nor a “poor attempt at an excuse.” It addressed the fact that munitions manufacturing in Japan was highly distributed in small workshops in homes and suburbs, and thus that those areas became legitimate military targets. Failure to bomb Tokyo would have led to additional allied deaths and the lengthening of the war.
And, no, the allies never deliberately sought to cause civilian deaths. Your quote does not support your claim.
This issue is difficult enough to debate without the fallacious introduction of affected emotional contrivances. No one has ever spoken in admiration for the firebombing. Serious historians – and amateurs – recognize the military necessity that was compelled on the allies by the nature of the war.
What did that do to their quality control?
I don’t believe that my Father and his associates living in tents in New Guinea would have been terribly concerned at the time if some of the bombs had caused civilian deaths; perhaps not even Grandmother. But them Grandmother had lost a son.
I’ve never read anything that addresses this.
People come in all kinds. There were surely people on both sides who crowed, “Fry, you bastards,” and others on both sides who wept.
There were also most certainly strategic errors made. The idea that area bombing will “Destroy the enemy’s will to continue fighting” was badly overestimated. The London Blitz should have eliminated that kind of reasoning, but didn’t.
Much had been learned from WWI. But there were still terrible blind spots, and horrible realpolitik gambits, and all the rest of the shitty things we humans seem never to learn how to stop doing. Show me a better species, and I’ll enlist with them.
The post is attempting to claim the indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities was a more legitimate act of war than the indiscriminate bombing of German cities, which is an utter whitewash. Since the entire economy of nations are mobilized to support war, under the theory of total war as practiced during WW2 the factory worker is as legitimate of a target as the soldier; the entire economy of an enemy nation is a target. Trying to claim it was ‘more’ legitimate to firebomb Japanese civilians than it was to dehouse the German civilian population by dropping incendiaries on German cities because Japan’s light industry was more widely distributed in its cities than Germany’s was is absurd.
This is exactly the kind of whitewash I’m talking about. No serious historian - amateur or otherwise - would make such a ludicrous statement. The only one injecting emotion here is you; that you could make that statement with a straight face shows how emotionally invested you are that the Allies remain as pure as the driven snow in what was the single most horrific event of the last century. What do you imagine the planners expected to happen when over a thousand tons of napalm was dropped on a target area with a civilian population density of 103,000 per square mile? This is what they expected to happen:
You might also want to take a look at the area bombing directive as a starting place to clear up misconceptions that the Allies never deliberately sought to cause civilian deaths.
Are you actually trying to justify the Japanese internment here?
No, I am pointing out why I believe they were interned and not German Americans.
Perhaps their eating POWs had something to do with it, too.
Ad hominem, and uninteresting. Have a nice whatever.
The bolded part of the quote from Dissonance’s post is the point I was trying to make. While attacking Germany’s industrial base could largely be done by bombing the industrial areas of cities (if bombing accuracy had been up to the task), significant parts of Japan’s industry were spread throughout otherwise residential areas. The only purpose of bombing housing in Germany was to attack the civilian workforce. For Japan it was a secondary effect of attacking the industrial capacity.
I don’t doubt that attacking Japan’s civilian workforce was seen as a *desirable *secondary effect, but nonetheless there was a better justification for the attacks than just “dehousing”.
No. The massive Tokyo firebombing was targeted at the dense housing area of shitamachi Tokyo (the area where my ex-wife’s mother lived) which was not a manufacturing area.
Oita Ward, where my ex-wife’s father lived had more small manufacturing but it was attacked much later in the campaign.
Also, can you please explain the attacks on small Japanese cities?
Are you claiming that these were all centers of manufacturing as well?
Gen. Arnold was convinced that he could firebomb the Japanese into submission, and had been resisting changing strategies from burning down the cities, despite evidence from the evaluation teams in Germany that they needed to be targeting the transportation systems more. They finally were on track to make the change when the war ended.
Your statement which begins with "While attacking Germany’s industrial base could largely be done by bombing the industrial areas of cities (if bombing accuracy had been up to the task), " is baseless. They didn’t have that degree of accuracy, so that speculation is meaningless. If they had had that level of precision, they wouldn’t have needed to attack the civilians.
The highest priority for the Allies was the aircraft manufacturing, in order to stop production of enemy fighters. That was not done in small houses in the back streets of old Tokyo.
No, because the internment occurred before the horrible Japanese treatment of POWs.
Actually, they never made such a offer. Something like that was tentatively floated thru the USSR, but if was hardly a “offer”.
Yes, you are correct, One of the core ideas behind the Allies was “no separate peace”.
In any case, a blockade would have killed far more Japanese than the Bombs did. And would have spelled the slow horrible death of all Allied POW’s. Firebombing would have continued and it killed far more than the A-Bombs did.
Japanese internment in the United States was due to blatant racism, pure and simple. And I’m surprised there is really any debate on that issue. I felt that historians were in agreement with that at this point in history.
Having said that, I don’t think that racism played much of a part if any on the decision to use the atomic bomb. We would have made the same decision in Germany.
It was racist in that you could look at a guy and tell that he was Japanese. Coupled with the Hawaiian Japanese helping the downed pilot.
If Americans whose ancestors came from Germany were readily identifiable, I would imagine they would have also been interned.
If anything, the difference is this: If we’d had the atomic bomb before the Fall of Berlin, we would have done everything in our power to locate Adolf Hitler and drop the damned thing directly on his head. We did not, however, drop one of them on the Emperor or the Japanese Supreme Command.
Not entirely. All Axis nationals were interned. This was normal.
BUT just in the case of the Japanese-Americans, those were were American Citizens were also interned. That was racist. Some small justification can be made due to the fact there would have been attacks on them by ultra-patriotic Americans.
You are correct in that the decision to use the Atomic Bomb was in no way racist.
And, it was also “No Big Deal” (assuming we can accept the firebombings as “no big deal”, which is kinda a stretch).
In 1945 the A-bomb was just another weapon.
It’s only that recently after 50-60 years of Propaganda (*true *propaganda, but propaganda just the same) the Nuclear war is unthinkable that we think there was something morally wrong with using the Bomb (assuming we accept that firebombs were acceptable).
That is necessary of course. In the 50’s with the proliferation of Nukes, it became obvious that a Nuclear was unthinkable, that it could very well end civilization and perhaps even Life on Earth.
Thus to us today, using the Bomb in 1945 was a difficult Moral decision that needs justification. That simple wasn’t very true then. We were at War- once you accept firebombings it is no big stretch to go to the A-Bomb. It was “just another weapon”. It is no longer.
Thus the wailings and long diatribes and hypotheticals of what were the alternatives to using this Most Horrible and Unthinkable of Weapons are simply hindsight.
Sure, maybe the Invasion of the Japanese Homeland would have “only” resulted in 25K US military deaths (and hundreds of thousands of Japanese note) instead of some estimates of 500K casualties (and of course casualties do not = deaths).
Sure, maybe the Japanese would have surrendered with only allowing them the Emperor. But it would have been months.
Sure, maybe the Japanese would have surrendered with the entry of the USSR.
Sure, we could have starved them out thru a blockade. Overall, far more Japanese would have died that way, and likely almost all Allied POWs.
None of those matter. The A-bomb then was “just another weapon”, the Japanese were showing incredible tenacity. American servicemen were still dying. The firebombing and blockade were still continuing. The Bomb was a tool that needed to be used- by the thoughts and knowledge of that time.
The Doolittle Raiders were ordered to not bomb the Imperial palace. That has always struck me as odd. Destroying their Emperor, believed to be divine, would have been a great way to lower morale and illustrate how determined and strong the United States was.
I would have chosen if not the Japanese of German leadership, the greatest troop concentration they had.
Sorry, hit submit instead of preview.
Not buying your argument. Stating that Axis Nationals, (Axis POWs) and Japanese Americans under lock and key are somehow the same thing is just plain wrong and illogical.
Japanese Americans were interned because they were Japanese. Not because any crime they committed, or were imminently going to commit.
German Americans were not interned
Italian Americans were not.
There was blatant racism against Asian American people, particularly on the west coast since well before the 20th century. That’s why the were interned.