While researching what Japanese students learn about WW2
I was a bit surprised by how many people made the statement that we used Atomic Bombs
for no justifiable reason. I was always taught that it was to bring an end to the war which
could have lasted several years past 1945 if we hadn’t.
I’m going to move this over to GQ.
We got so tired of people posting in the wrong forum that the administration just snapped.
You seem like a nice guy, so here are serious answers one can choose to debate about:
- Yes, to stop the war.
- To stop the war, and save lives overall
- To prevent the USSR from invading Japan
- To test the technology / intimidate the USSR
- Truman was eeeviiilll.
I also have a feeling, ever so slight, that this has been discussed her before. A search would be prudent.
To save my father’s life. He was in Marine Boot Camp at the time.
It was to stop the war. There’s no end to the speculation about what would have happened if we didn’t do it. Several different justifications for stopping the war in that manner, and the specific targets and timing of the bombing were considered, some of this is documented, the decision was made by Truman, and only he knew exactly which factors he considered and based his decision on.
Because the alternative would cost American lives.
A fucking LOT of American lives. Estimates were as many as 1 million American casualties in the invasion and defeat of Japan. God knows how many multiples of that for Japanese casualties.
Millions of Japanese lives were saved from starvation. We had bombed their infrastructure to the point that the 1945 rice harvest failed. Many were going to die during the winter. Putting a "premature’ end to the war allowed American food aid into the country.
I have never understood why it is estimated that so many American lives would be lost.
Suppose the US blockaded the Japanese home islands. How long could the Japanese have held out without importing any food or other necessities?
Could they feed themselves without imports?
My guess is that they could not really do a satisfactory job of feeding themselves unless they imported food and other necessities from other nations.
If that is true, then the issue might not have been so much about saving lives as it would be about saving money.
In other words, it would have cost the US more money to keep the war going with their blockade of Japan. It would be an expensive thing to do. But, ultimately, it would force Japan to surrender or starve.
In that case, we would still have been able to win the war without much loss of life. It would have cost us more money. But we still could have won and we still could have avoided all that loss of life.
Of course, producing an atom bomb was hugely expensive and I’m not at all certain how to estimate the cost of maintaining a blockade until Japan surrendered vs. the cost of producing two atom bombs.
It’s pretty well documented that the war was all but over when Truman gave the nod to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Autolycus hit the high points, but I think the possibilty exists that the primary motivating factor was real life testing of nuclear weapons.
I do think the muscle-flex against the Soviet Union was also a motivating factor. No one will ever know for sure what the list of motivations and their rank of importance were to Truman. It was a hard fucking decision to make and I don’t think he ever had any responsibility to explain it.
Preventing Russia from interfering was another reason to end the war quickly.
We didn’t want another Germany with half the country Russian occupied. Russia could have held key Japanese islands for a long, long time.
And the atomic bombs were just the tip of the iceberg. Before that came the systematic carpet bombing of Japanese civilian population centers with explosive and incendiary bombs. We were fighting for an unconditional surrender from Japan with Total War being our chosen means to get it.
To put things in perspective: Japanese civilian deaths outnumbered all American deaths in WW2, and Chinese civilian deaths outnumbered all Japanese deaths by over six times.
I’m going to take an unpopular position and say that Total War itself is an atrocity and Japan and the US were both guilty to some extent.
(WW2 Casualty Data: File:World War II Casualties.svg - Wikipedia)
Winter was coming to Europe as well. It was noted in my history class that we need the war over with to begin rebuilding there, as well.
You seem to be confused about how starvation works. People who don’t have food die.
I don’t understand the morality of saying letting millions of people starve to death is better than killing thousands of people with a bomb.
It was clear that Japan would lose, but there was every indication that they would continue to fight to the last man, extending the war, and resulting in a very high death toll among all involved. The purpose of the bombings was to end the war. They were done in concert with demands for unconditional surrender. We had already tested a bomb, and we were concerned that the two additional bombs we had wouldn’t work, the opposite of a desire for a ‘real life’ test.
Right, but that was more a reason for the second bomb than the first. The US bombed Hiroshima on 8/6/45 and the Soviets declared war on Japan on 8/8/45. Had that not happened, it’s very likely that Nagasaki would never have been hit. As it happened, the US dropped another nuke on Japan the next day, 8/9/45 with very strong implications to the Soviets to kindly fuck off. Therein lies the birth of the Cold War that would dominate the next four decades.
Since the reasons are open to debate, I’m going to move this to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Because people can’t seem to understand that when you have several bad options, that you need to pick the best one anyway.
I read that the Japanese people in general were of the mindset that they would fight to the last man. Even the civilians. Ending that war saved more lives than the bombs took. But people don’t want to see it that way.
I can’t and won’t tell you that you’re wrong, but there is credible recorded international correspondence that indicates that Japan was ready to concede defeat. Hirohito wanted to maintain his status as Emperor and that was a major point of contention, but Japan was ready to surrender. They really weren’t ready to have every able bodied man in the country die in a war.
This - with the attitudes of the time, the real answer as I see it is that they used the bombs because they had them. Nukes weren’t yet in the special near-taboo “threat to humanity, use only in utmost extremity” category we’ve put them in; they were regarded as impressive, but just weapons.