Hiroshima (1946)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Then, in college and especially after, learning about the equal horrors of the Japanese war machine, and maybe actually more the non-horrific but relentless robotic support for the war (or obedience towards the emperor, government, etc) among the people, I realized that it actually did bring an end to the war. Which if it had continued, could have consumed far more lives. (whether it had to be this tool, of course, is certainly worthy of debate)
Now, my 3rd phase of thinking -- beyond any opinion on tactics or reaction or bombs in the moment of a war -- is how do we get people to help themselves get out of the path to war? Each and every one of us, who whether by support or indifference, or tacit approval, or compounded misinformation, or ego, get ourselves into situations that we look back 50 years from now and say, "what happened?".
Surely, we have the tools and desire, don't we? I hope.
Just a different outlook on how the war should be handled.
Curiously, this website has a large number of commentators that believe that luck is one of the biggest factors in startup success. Yet, in this other domain of antagonistic participants, war, the victor is always the better strategist, having seen through the flaws of his enemy. Mere luck plays no part here. A curious result to me. It appears that Man is elevated to supreme intelligence when tasked with war, and finds himself a mere leaf on air currents otherwise.
Of course, I’m no peacenik. I have no problem over-bombing a population so I don’t really see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as tragedies. Since no one has an incentive to reveal the true minimum that would cause them to capitulate, it is usually a good idea when you’re almost winning to make sure you’re definitely winning. I have no problem with the death of those who would prefer my death. Just fascinated at how we conquer luck in this sphere alone.
What about those who have no opinion one way or the other about your death, or are incapable of having an informed opinion, such as very young children?
So the children will die if they must die. And they will live if it does not affect victory.
The most memorable line from the movie Patton (I don't know if General Patton said this IRL):
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
If you dig deep into retrospective analyses of wars, you’ll find plenty of discussion about mistakes, missed opportunities and just dumb luck.
That's begging the question - was a US invasion the only alternative? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/nuclear-war-or... argues that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings. And that's for unconditional surrender - a conditional one would be even more easily achievable.
And from the Allied perspective, after the Bataan death march, the massacre of surrendered US troops and civilians in Wake, and the hundreds of similar massacres of surrendered allied troops, and rape and murder of nurses and civilians, across the Pacific, no one was going to allow the Japanese leadership or military off the hook.
Furthermore the article is self-contradictory, e.g. first it says the conventional bombings were so successful that a nuclear wasn't necessary, then it says since the conventional bombings were unsuccessful the nuclear strikes also wouldn't make a difference (pure conjecture by developers of the weapon, who are no experts in neither politics nor military strategy or history).
It's also simply a lie that the casualty estimates were pulled out of thin air. Ask yourself: don't you think the US army would try to estimate how many of its soldierd would die (cost) vs how many Japanese soldiers would die and how many military targets would be destroyed (benefit)? Of course they did a huge study on this topic!
The article also suggested the Japanese would've surrendered if key people had been left in power. Yeah, maybe (again conjecture). But for comparison: if the US had allowed Hitler to go unpunished, conquered territory to remain under Nazi possession, the Nazis would also maybe have surrendered earlier. But why would you even offer such a surrender? It would render the entire war pointless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
As proven earlier with Operation Ten-Go / The Battle of the East China Sea, many in the Japanese military preferred spiteful suicidal attacks to surrender, even when the hopelessness of their situation was abundantly clear.
For some reason, this reminds me of the refactoring advice.
> The Kyūjō incident (宮城事件, Kyūjō Jiken) was an attempted military coup d'état in the Empire of Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened on the night of 14–15 August 1945, just before the announcement of Japan's surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender.
> The officers murdered Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori of the First Imperial Guards Division and attempted to counterfeit an order to the effect of occupying the Tokyo Imperial Palace (Kyūjō). They attempted to place the Emperor under house arrest, using the 2nd Brigade Imperial Guard Infantry. They failed to persuade the Eastern District Army and the high command of the Imperial Japanese Army to move forward with the action. Due to their failure to convince the remaining army to oust the Imperial House of Japan, they performed ritual suicide. As a result, the communiqué of the intent for a Japanese surrender continued as planned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
Would resistance to surrender have found more support if only a single bomb had been dropped? We will never know.
And you think bombs at sea would scare them?
“…many U.S. officials and scientists argued that a demonstration would sacrifice the shock value of the atomic attack, and the Japanese could deny the atomic bomb was lethal, making the mission less likely to produce surrender. Allied prisoners of war might be moved to the demonstration site and be killed by the bomb. They also worried that the bomb might be a dud since the Trinity test was of a stationary device, not an air-dropped bomb. In addition, although more bombs were in production, only two would be available at the start of August, and they cost billions of dollars, so using one for a demonstration would be expensive.”
And it turns out the Japanese military was exactly in such a deep denial. After Hiroshima they said it would take a longtime for the US to build another. After Nagasaki they said so what, we will just retreat to bunkers and force the Allies to invade. After Hirohito decided to surrender, the military attempted a coup.
From wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War), "Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's research has led him to conclude that the atomic bombings were not the principal reason for Japan's capitulation. He argues that Japan's leaders were impacted more by the swift and devastating Soviet victories on the mainland in the week after Joseph Stalin's August 8 declaration of war because the Japanese strategy to protect the home islands was designed to fend off an Allied invasion from the south and left virtually no spare troops to counter a Soviet threat from the north. Furthermore, the Japanese could no longer hope to achieve a negotiated peace with the Allies by using the Soviet Union as a mediator with the Soviet declaration of war. That, according to Hasegawa, amounted to a "strategic bankruptcy" for the Japanese and forced their message of surrender on August 15, 1945.[39][16] Others with similar views include the Battlefield series documentary,[2][11] among others, but all, including Hasegawa, state that the surrender was not caused by only one factor or event."
The Jewel Voice Broadcast should not be read uncritically.
It is very telling that USSR offensive on August 9 was according to the plans made together with US months in advance, and so US could hardly time the 2 bombs better - one on August 6 and another several hours after the start of the offensive - to make such an extremely clear message.
I do believe the bombings were a strategic show-of-force to the Soviet Union since they were coming out of the war as a global power; USSR were instrumental in ending the war.
It was already defeated, and offering to surrender, before the USSR joined the fight.
Totally surrounded/blockaded, no allies left in the world, bombed at will, what else could it do but accept defeat?
This thread is being rate limited, reply in edit:
Denying Korea and Taiwan is easier said than done. Remember that Japan essentially won the continental war against China. It's best equipped and most experienced troops are there. Japan is also in an optimal position to control ocean access to Korea. Any boats have to travel through the East China Sea, or sea of Japan to reach Korea. Both of which are in range of the thousands of kamikaze planes built for the purpose of destroying vessels that sail close to Japan.
At this point, you're talking about conducting an invasion of a landmass even larger than the Japanese home islands, against better troops, and with more difficult naval access. It would undoubtedly incur substantially more losses than the 100 to 200 thousand inflicted by the atomic bombings. And to what end? A hostile military government would still be in power back in Japan.
Before these bombs were dropped, tens of thousands were dying on days with no large military operations.
This is blatantly false. Even after two atomic bombs had fallen on Japan, their military leaders -- and indeed most of their population -- remained committed to fight on until the nation of Japan ceased to exist. It was only the intervention of the emperor himself (who never gets involved in matters of war) that convinced the military and the people to surrender after the bombs were dropped.
The counter argument for that is it took two atomic bombs for Japan to concede. And after the 2nd one it was 3 days before they gave up.
Could a blockade have worked? Maybe. But how long would it have taken? Would we all just sat and watched while hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians starved to death over a few years?
I hope I wouldn't have dropped the bomb on a populated city if I were in Truman's shoes, but without the benefit of hindsight, I'm not positive I would have decided differently.
On a side note, Japan is a wonderful country, particularly the countryside. My wife lived there for 13 months while we were dating, and I have many fond memories of trips around Japan with her. Lost wallets more common than not are returned to the police with money still inside. One of my colleagues once saw a man in a business suit sleeping on a park bench one morning, obviously drunk, and someone had placed the man's dropped phone and wallet on his chest.
It's a slightly more optimistic take on the tragedies of the 20th century.
[0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-n...
If the war aim was the permanent political defeat of Japanese fascism, then this was important. You don't just want the leader's signature on paper, you want defeat to be undeniable to everyone.
In both cases, the naval blockade left a lot of civilians hungry, and was great military value-for-money. But politically, that was easier to forget afterwards. Your adversary's ability to destroy whole cities with one plane was not.
(In germany's case, having two different armies in Berlin for half a century was also kind-of hard to forget.)
We had already destroyed most Japanese cities with fire bombs. Hiroshima was one of the few cities specifically spared from fire bombs
The only real difference with the atomic bombings was it was one bomb from one plane.
Some of the most fascinating reading I’ve done is the Pentagon papers because they go into exquisite detail about all of the thinking that resulted in the US’s involvement in Vietnam. It wasn’t just the Domino Theory, it wasn’t just containment of China, it wasn’t just getting France’s support for NATO, it wasn’t just Truman’s, JFK’s and Johnson’s efforts to look tough on communism.
It was all that plus a dozen other things.
This may be the mainstream opinion in the US, but do note it's not the mainstream opinion in other countries. Alternative explanations include that the real purpose of the two bombs was to show the Soviets the nuclear might of the US (this view is suggested in the Hiroshima museum in Japan, but just in case you discount it because Japan is obviously not a neutral party, this opinion is also held in some countries in Latin America -- even some people in the US believe this). Even at the time, some people in the US army opposed the bombing and believed it had no military justification.
That is brought an end to the war with fewer casualties, both American and Japanese even moreso, is not a difficult claim to support. Japan planned to fight a defensive war against an amphibious invasion in order to negotiate more favorable surrender terms. The Japanese estimated that this would incur 20 million Japanese casualties, and this plan was approved. Even if we assume that Japan's war machine would collapse before this figure of lives lost was reached, it is almost certain that the death toll would be in the millions. Germany, without the advantage of being a mountainous island nation and having a lower population than Japan, fought on its own soil in 1945 to the effect of several million dead. Thus, it's almost certain that the atomic bombings resulted in an order of magnitude fewer Japanese lives lost than an conventional invasion.
(a city with military production, sure sure, but they were choosen not because of military value, but because they were relatively undamaged, so the effect of the bombs could be studied. Concern for loss of japan civilian live was never an issue)
There only existed two bombs at the time. Had the bombs been dropped as a show of force, it is very likely the US and Japan would have to suffer through a costly invasion anyway.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
[2] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/timeline search for 1945 July 23 entry.
The US built a massive manufacturing pipeline to make nuclear weapons. Little boy was a once off. Fat man was basically a functional prototype. And the manufacturing pipeline was running and kept running after the war. How much weapons grade plutonium they had left over after they bombed Nagasaki is kind of a quibble.
Why would a demonstration need to be told the japanese in advance?
And a dud could have also happened to the one used on hiroshima.
A shock effect could have been achieved by a bomb detonated close to Tokyo. And with papers dropped, saying, this will happen to all your cities, soon.
And the US ultimately did accept a surrender on the condition that the imperial family not be tried for war crimes (a particularly contentious point for China, since a royal family member was the commanding officer in charge of the forces that perpetrated the crimes at Nanking).
To this end, Stalin and Molotov strung out the negotiations with the Japanese, giving them false hope of a Soviet-mediated peace. [..] The Japanese would have to surrender unconditionally to all the Allies. To prolong the war, the Soviets opposed any attempt to weaken this requirement.[56] This would give the Soviets time to complete the transfer of their troops from the Western Front to the Far East, and conquer Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, northern Korea, South Sakhalin, the Kuriles, and possibly Hokkaidō - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Soviet_inte...
However, the Japanese presented no formal terms, because details were to be worked out by negotiation. - https://www.quora.com/When-Japan-offered-conditional-surrend...
Edit as reply due to rate limit:
The article you linked doesn't support the claims you made about Japan's conditional surrender. The closest it comes is "Anami wanted retention of the emperor, self-disarmament, no foreign occupation, and trial of any Japanese war criminals by Japan itself". But that is what Anami wanted, not what was written down in some final, take-it-or-leave-it offer. And that's from before the Soviet declaration of war.
In fact the article basically contradicts your claim about the necessity of the bombs:
> The bomb played a part in Japan’s surrender, but it may not have been necessary, he said. Had the U.S. drawn Stalin into publicly supporting the Potsdam Declaration’s unconditional surrender demand, Japan might not have held out hope for a Soviet-brokered deal. Had it guaranteed the emperor’s position, Japan might have surrendered earlier, Hasegawa said, though this is yet another point that draws endless historical debate.
> “Other alternatives were available, but they were not explored,” Hasegawa said.
Choosing the bombs over merely exploring other options is rather damning, don't you think?
The military fervently wanted a US invasion, believing it could inflict millions of casualties and then negotiate better terms. And many Japanese didn’t feel like they had even lost yet, they were willing to endure bombings feeling their fortress island was unassailable.
https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/world-war-ii-th...
Many of who resumed as they did during the War in the re-construction phase, I highly recommend the book: A Nazi in Exile. Its about Martin Bormann, a high ranking SS lieutenant close to Hitler who was already making deals in what seemed like the inevitable defeat of Germany, Italy and Japan by 1943-44 or so and starting to ensure it funneled its funds out of Germany into Switzerland and helped the biggest corporations (on both sides) continue to thrive in the post-war economy.
Many of whom still remain as monoliths to this day.
I think all this does is re-enforce General Butler's claim that: War is a racket. Everything else is just footnotes that often contradict and conflict with one another to obscure the obvious fact that no one 'wins' in War except a very small collective few in Banks, Industry that shape war policy for other Poor people to fight.
""Hoshina Memorandum" on the Emperor's "Sacred Decision [go-seidan]," 9-10 August, 1945 Source: Zenshiro Hoshina, Daitoa Senso Hishi: Hoshina Zenshiro Kaiso-roku [Secret History of the Greater East Asia War: Memoir of Zenshiro Hoshina] (Tokyo, Japan: Hara-Shobo, 1975), excerpts from Section 5, "The Emperor made go-seidan [= the sacred decision] – the decision to terminate the war," 139-149 [translation by Hikaru Tajima]
"An overview of the destruction of Hiroshima [undated, circa August-September 1945] (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 306-NT) Despite the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviet declaration of war, and growing worry about domestic instability, the Japanese cabinet (whose decisions required unanimity) could not form a consensus to accept the Potsdam Declaration. Members of the Supreme War Council—“the Big Six”[46]—wanted the reply to Potsdam to include at least four conditions (e.g., no occupation, voluntary disarmament); they were willing to fight to the finish. The peace party, however, deftly maneuvered to break the stalemate by persuading a reluctant emperor to intervene. According to Hasegawa, Hirohito had become convinced that the preservation of the monarchy was at stake. Late in the evening of 9 August, the emperor and his advisers met in the bomb shelter of the Imperial Palace.
"Zenshiro Hoshina, a senior naval official, attended the conference and prepared a detailed account. With Prime Minister Suzuki presiding, each of the ministers had a chance to state his view directly to Hirohito. While Army Minister Anami tacitly threatened a coup (“civil war”), the emperor accepted the majority view that the reply to the Potsdam declaration should include only one condition not the four urged by “Big Six.” Nevertheless, the condition that Hirohito accepted was not the one that foreign minister Togo had brought to the conference. What was at stake was the definition of the kokutai (national policy). Togo’s proposal would have been generally consistent with a constitutional monarchy because it defined the kokutai narrowly as the emperor and the imperial household. What Hirohito accepted, however, was a proposal by the extreme nationalist Kiichiro Hiranuma which drew upon prevailing understandings of the kokutai: the “mythical notion” that the emperor was a living god. “This was the affirmation of the emperor’s theocratic powers, unencumbered by any law, based on Shinto gods in antiquity, and totally incompatible with a constitutional monarchy.” Thus, the Japanese response to the Potsdam declaration opposed “any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of his Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” This proved to be unacceptable to the Truman administration."
I’ve changed my opinion on this topic many times over the years. Today I think it’s just arrogant to say it was obviously wrong or obviously right. Reality is too complicated. Counterfactuals abound.
One dimension that people haven’t discussed in this thread, is that ending the war with atomic bombs and napalm prevented a bilateral invasion of Japan, which would have led to a Korea or Germany-like partitioning of postwar Japan.
Instead of a speedy recovery and track to self determination, there would have been 50 years of Cold War tensions, perhaps proxy wars.
But maybe not! It’s very complicated.
(And I'm not limiting this to the circumstances under discussion -- I'm talking about the view that, no matter what situation you're in, there should be a way out that isn't a crime. Such people will, for example, object violently if somewhat incoherently to the fact that, under Qing Chinese law, a man ordered by his father to commit a crime had no way to get out of that situation while following the law: following the order is illegal, but so is disobeying the command.)
Complicated Chinese (and Japanese) laws about legal and familiar duty are really not the subject under discussion here, but a red herring. Murdering innocent people is an entirely different matter.
Finally, consider there are many people in this world who won't commit some crimes -- such as genocide -- even if there is no way out and refusing will cost them their own lives.
Yes, this viewpoint is more or less the opposite of the viewpoint I describe above, and it is also common. But so is the other one.
I'll take a stab at it.
If one sums together the estimated deaths in Asia caused by Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties), both military and civilian, one gets totals in excess of 15-22 million. This compares to about 5 million dead in the Holocaust. So basically, Japan effectively committed 3 to 4 Holocausts, a fact not often remarked upon in these discussions. If we compare that to the roughly 0.25 million estimated dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, the US would have had to drop 40 more atomic bombs to catch up to the Germans and another 120-176 atomic bombs to catch up to the Japanese. (If one likes, they can subtract out military casualties or otherwise adjust the numbers but the ratios are still high.)
One should also factor in that the Nazis simply executed the majority of the victims of the Holocaust as efficiently as they could in concentration camps. The deaths inflicted during the IJA occupation, on the other hand was accompanied by rape and by torture, including on children, across significant parts of a continent. It's notable that even a diehard Nazi who was in China was so revolted by what he was witnessing that he intervened to protect civilians from the IJA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe. Given the option, it doesn't seem unlikely that many of the IJA's victims would have preferred a death by nuclear blast; at least it would have been impersonal.
So, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki war crimes? I think it's not unreasonable to say that even if they were, they were negligible in the grand scheme of things.
For example, rape and murder against German civilians is not morally justifiable just because the Nazis were horrendous monsters.
One might argue that the lingering radiation effects made atomic weapons worse but, on the other hand, the firebombing would've been done more than once. Really six of one, half a dozen of the other, except you don't see that many people bringing up firebombings as a war crime.
2. Invade. The Japanese had 900,000 troops in Kyushu, plus militia forces. Japanese estimates were for 20 million deaths. Look up the battle for Okinawa some time.
3. Let the Soviets invade. Same deaths, just not US soldiers. Plus Stalin didn't like to give up territory the Soviets conquered.
4. Continue the blockade, with or without conventional bombing. Likely, the Japanese government would have surrendered or collapsed by mid-1946. Again, millions of deaths due to starvation. And civil war.
Instead the US occupied Japan and forced cultural changes upon them, which resulted in Japan becoming a democratic, peaceful economic power and tremendous contributor to the global economy and both global and regional stability.
Our debate came down to whether or not directly / immediately killing hundreds of thousands of citizens was justified by potentially preventing even more dying in a subsequent invasion. The class was similarly split.
Truly inspiring in comparison with the robotic obedience of the Japanese who would dig in to protect their island, whatever the cost may be.
* Aside from broad policy, the difference in attitude is clearly shown by actions of individual soldiers. Individual Britons in theatre would usually be prepared to surrender if their situation was hopeless, as shown by the number of actual British PoWs in WW2, whereas this was much rarer for Japanese soldiers.
Let me know if the British prepared troops and civilians to use suicide as a weapon against a German invasion in any significant quantity.
That's not quite the case. The conditions of surrender proposed, which the Japanese government rebuffed (or, 'mokusatsu'[0]) particularly included that Japan surrender its control over Korea and the island known now as Taiwan. It's more accurate to say that the Japanese empire would dig in to protect the areas they'd acquired, not just their island. In Korea, they'd put a lot of effort into trying to integrate the peninsula into Japan proper, for example linguistically.
Not really; some in Japan were seeking a surrender and some, notably nearly all of the Japanese military, were quite definitively not. Had the internal coup intended to prevent the surrender succeeded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident), Eisenhower's quote would have been entirely false instead of a half-truth.
IMO, his quote should be read as that of a politician (which he was, at that point, having served two terms as president), rather than that of a military general.
It was not so cut and dry, as his words imply.
The strategic bombing survey of 1946, subject to no objections about Eisenhower’s relative objectivity compared to your own, concludes that the Japanese government was well into the process of determining how to surrender, with predictable resistance from the military but endorsement by the Emperor as they were in the process of determining how to stand down. It also points out that the majority of the populace had already lost hope for the war effort, which is now the bomb’s justification.
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/united-...
The document you link to would also benefit from the same treatment, being written in 1946 by the Strategic Bombing survey (a group that notably preferred precision bombing of industrial infrastructure, to the indiscriminate destruction of napalm and atomic weapons).
It not only makes the point you describe (that the Japanese population was war fatigued), but it also concludes that the use of atomic weapons (plus the Soviet declaration of war) gave the peace-seeking factions of the war council a platform to strong arm the army (which wished to continue the war) into accepting the Potsdam terms (unconditional surrender).
Prior to the use of atomic weapons, Japan was seeking a conditional surrender where they kept Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Manchuria. They were also sincerely developing strategies to prolong the defense of a home invasion. Even the emperor (who was pro-surrender) encouraged the simultaneous development of both plans. It is true that there were influential factions who preferred peace. Without the atomic bombs, we cannot know how long it would have taken for them to gain ascendancy in the government, and how many would have perished before they came to an unconditional surrender.
Again, I’m not saying it’s cut and dry that they were necessary. I’m saying it was and is complicated and nuanced.
So saving face is dead on.
Military conflicts through out the world since suggest we do not.
When you think of the black ships of the Perry expedition, and then forward to the Japanese attack on England's Hong Kong colony, the French colonies in Indochina, America's colony in the Philippines (and Hawaii!) - then you see the above blurb is a perfect encapsulation of the western bourgeois mind.
1. Mastery of a weapon and combat (the nuclear weapon)
2. Weapon not in hand, but in the hearts and minds (loyalty and devotion to the cause)
3. The ultimate ideal - the weapon disappears altogether, and the warrior is at peace with the world.
That is a lot of words to say "civilians trying to survive during a war".
To make it even worse, the war criminals, that ones that were part of the "horrors of the Japanese war machine" were spared by the USA after the war. Fearing an increase influence of Communism in Asia, the USA let the war criminals go unpunished.
Targeting civilians while sparing war criminals is hardly a moral stand point.
Then you have been fed propaganda. The bomb had nothing to do with Japan surrendering.
This is captured very well in Leiji Matsumoto's "The Cockpit" anime short, where in the protagonist, a Nazi Luftwaffe Pilot, is faced with the dilemma where Nazis had access to Nuclear weapons before the Allies but ultimately told from the perspective of the Japanese and perhaps even the Hibakusha themselves as he was born in 1938 and saw the the War in Japan first hand in this lifetime. It's pretty heavy stuff but conveys how this technology should not be in the hands of Humans in their current form, as its not worth the risk of the inevitable usecases we've collectively created thus far.
> Now, my 3rd phase of thinking -- beyond any opinion on tactics or reaction or bombs in the moment of a war -- is how do we get people to help themselves get out of the path to war? Each and every one of us, who whether by support or indifference, or tacit approval, or compounded misinformation, or ego, get ourselves into situations that we look back 50 years from now and say, "what happened?".
Honestly, War, especially to that massive destructive scale is only capable under the Nation-State model, which is what initially got me interested in Anarchism: as a tool for effective Anti-war measures.
I just fear Humanity may never truly be able to accept a Social model in which the State model is entirely absent and unnecessary before these things occur again, look how close this US vs CCP rhetoric is stoking the flames of potentially WW3 (both nuclear capable) when we have a so many ongoing crises that need the collective focus of all of Humanity to come close to even trying to solve.
Sidenote: The bombing of Horoshima and Nagasaki took place after the US had effectively crippled the Japanese economy and supply lines in a nation with no natural resources of their own. Its often speculated about how much longer they could have put up a resistance, prolonging Japan's defeat, and what would ultimately create a near permanent occupation by the US, but the War effort and the manufacturing of these armaments to the level they had before was impossible by the time Fat Man and Little Boy entered the Pacific theater.
Moreover, the constant conventional bombing and air raids of Tokyo by Allies (Tokyo Daikushu) claimed more lives (that still stands to this day) than both Nuclear bombs combined at the time of it being dropped, but the tragic thing being that that Hibakusha and their descendants still suffer long after the Empire fell, but still live with the horrible birth defects and health issues to this day. The way the US via GE and Westinghouse imposed Nuclear technology on them was perhaps the most cloaked dagger to Humanity I have ever seen in the reconstruction phase of all the 'axis' nations when you see how devastating Fukushima is (at the hands of TEPCO/Abe Government) that continues to pour massive nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean to this day.
The lesson (hopefully) being, that no one 'won' and all of Humanity 'lost' as we probably embarked on a very dark and destructive phase of our Human Condition that we probably would have been better not knowing we were capable of as a Species. Just look at the tragic plight of the Marshall Islands in the race for other nations to be Nuclear capable as well.
Here is a mini documentary [1] told from perspective of the grandson interviewing his grandfather on just this subject, who was a Californian-born Japanese who went back to Japan to live with his family in Hiroshima while his entire American Citizen family back in California were sent to the one of the worst internement camps of all but he was also an American-Hibakusha (Nuclear bomb survivor).
I'm may be biased as I grew up in the 90s when Japanese culture was mainstream and prevalent but also had Japanese childhood friends growing up in SoCal who were often the grandchildren of those sent to the camps, but it must be said that the way the Japanese were treated during this period is seriously one of the most dark and personally humiliating part of Californian History that I'm ashamed to admit took place. It shows how even being a supposed 'American' can be irrelevant if the State deems you as an enemy for actions that were done by a foreign nation completely unrelated to your own identity/citzenship if it its suits its end. Worse yet, all while lying how the US wasnot involved in WWII, specifically the Pacific Theatere as the AVG (American Air-force mercenaries) were contracted by the Chinese government training its soldiers but also in active combat against the Japanese under the guise of the 'American Volunteer Group' via Executive Order.
I have serious guilt issues, even though my military family actually didn't see active combat in that conflict but were in the Bay Area at that time and (indirectly) benefited from the Property seizures from that period.
Suffice this dark event is one of the main reasons why I'm anti-war.
Everything along these lines are counterfactual excercises and a nice way of justify the crime of dropping nuclear bombs on cities full of civilians. I don't buy this. And something we all know is that history is told by the victors.
Philosophically I find this revolting. Who are you, or me, or we to say what some other society should do? That should never be the goal and I don’t think anything good comes from starting with “other people are wrong, we should fix them.”
I realize I’m putting hyperbolic words in your mouth here but the point is nobody should be trusted with that kind of power.
> Surely, we have the tools and desire, don't we? I hope.
No, I don’t think we do. And if we did they would be more devastating than nuclear weapons. The closest thing is social media.
If true, your "philosophies" are in serious need of self-reflection.
The US had already destroyed mostly all Japanese cities. There was no large difference between a firestorm bombing and the bombs to Japanese cities. In Tokyo more than 700.000 buildings were destroyed and in one night more than 100.000 people killed by fire bombing.
The only difference was one of efficiency. It took 280 B-29 to kill 100k people in one night in Tokyo while it took 1 B-29 to kill 100k people in Hiroshima.
If I'm not mistaken, it is the first anime the Emperor of Japan has gone to see personally in theaters (https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2019/12/18-1/japans-e...).
Spoiler-free analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPS2U2ijBkU
US Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80192244
IMHO, this was not the result of how "evil" the German and Japanese regimes were (which seems to me to be a rationalization) but the result of 5 years of total war. I think that at some point people came to accept doing whatever it took to win and end the war.
In the context of what was going on I think dropping atomic bombs to precipitate the end of the war and send a message to the Soviets was perhaps not considered as big a deal as we might think because, as said, the result was already accepted looking at the conventional bombing raids that had taken place.
War is hell and total war means total hell.
More than ten million killed in war crimes by Japan alone in less than 15 years. These weren’t some secret at the time.
The invention of radar-assisted targeting thwarted this mission in the early phases of the war in Europe, and it took a tech arms race to get past it.
In the Pacific, the US’s primary objective was to secure an air base within strategic bombing range of Japan. It pursued this by capturing islands and investing in aeronautics (extending the range and carrying capacity of bombers).
Once within range of Japan, the Air Force tried strategic bombing at first, but found themselves unable to hit their targets. They had to fly above flak, and aim through the previously-undiscovered jet stream. They eventually gave up and turned from strategic bombing to recently-invented (demonstrated in 1942/3, mass produced in 1944) napalm. They knew it was awful, but considered it a trade of X lives now for 10x lives later.
All this to say, I don’t believe that war weariness significantly influenced the decision to use napalm and atomic weapons, in Europe or Japan. If the allied powers had encountered the opportunity to use them within the first year of the war, their military doctrine would have dictated their use.
Prior to WWII, its tone was more playful and humorous. The somewhat-detached, illustrative and poetic exposition originated in the war period, and resonates today.
It's been a good read so far. I found it quite interesting to hear about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings from the perspective of a young Japanese technician working in the war effort at the time.
A lot of comments in here are throwing around terms like "war crime". I'm not well informed on this subject, but the impression I get from this book at least, wasn't one of anger and accusation of wrongdoing WRT the bombings.
It comes across more as a humble acceptance of defeat, and perhaps a subtle criticism of his own nation's propaganda-washed populous, military-dominated leadership and authority, than anything accusing the Americans of committing war crimes.
He describes the bombings as clearly demonstrating how far behind Japan was technologically. Up until that point he had the impression that Japanese military technology was only slightly behind the Americans, based on reverse engineered equipment recovered from downed planes.
The thing I wonder is if the Americans could have just dropped a single bomb first on a relatively unpopulated area, near enough to a Japanese population center to witness its destructive force, without all the loss of civilian life. They might have surrendered after that. You still have the second bomb if they don't get the message. But I guess there wasn't exactly 100% certainty both bombs would function, and I don't know how long it would take to make another at the time - it's not like we had a huge stockpile of the enriched fissile material laying around.
In any case, so far I'd recommend the book, and I haven't even gotten to the stuff about Sony yet.
Another one the US was quite keen on is firebombing (aerial incendiary bombing of urban areas). Grave of the Fireflies is a movie well worth watching that provides a depiction of the effect of war on society.
There are some facinating technical details (in particluar the way heat reflected in the hills of Nagasaki) but in general it makes for grim reading.
I was always struck by the contrast between the dispassionate analysis in the report and the final eye witness account in the appendix.
I always had the feeling that they knew what they had done and knew that it was wrong.
- Run by an eternal Emperor adored by population at large (not counting few remaining intellectuals he murders every year)
- Extremely religious-jingoistic national ideology as “strong spiritual braces of Russians”. Quite similar to militaristic Japan “warrior spirit of master race”.
- Already invaded and conquered few smaller neighbors in the wars of conquest
- On of top sources of toxic influence in every field in the modern world
Countries who blindingly follow some two bit God-Emperor aggressive trash should not be surprised to eat Gamma rays for breakfast one fine morning.
The old one is more comprehensive, but a bit numbing in that it just hits you with fact after fact after fact.
The newer one is a bit shorter, and breaks up the action with recent interviews with historians, who delve deeper on the "why" of what happened.
The second one skips a few important things, so I recommend the older to fill in a few gaps even if you don't watch both.
Children on their way to school, the innocent and the weak were the victims of nuclear bombs, people were left without skin, their faces melted, bodies deformed and with radiation poisoning.
Sorry but it's a disgusting and weak act no matter how you people try spin it, I can never truly get past the facts and some of the footage of the aftermath available.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110225124451/http://www.mtholy...
UK and USA were on the winning side. This bred myths of British and American exceptionlism, which led eventually to Brexit, catastrophic handling of COVID19 and (perhaps) Trump.
History often has a sting in it's tail.