Hacker News Reader

Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

The Bomb was unique in that it was purely psychological in nature. It was a weapon that removed any chance that the Japanese leaders could sacrifice their own people to buy their escape from the war.

This was literally the policy of the Japanese government - "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million". Sacrifice every Japanese life to preserve the Emperor, and more importantly, his militaristic governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

There is a awful lot of moral relativism in these threads. Frankly, I strongly recommend that people who think that there was some sort of equivilent between the Nazis and the western powers, or between the Japanese and the Americans in World War 2 put down youtube videos, and really do a deep dive into what these states were really about.

View on HN

And the US was fine going along. "We'll keep killing civilians till you surrender".

What is your alternative? Starvation Blockade, or military invasion?

Do you understand what the Japanese state did to the Chinese and other peoples of southeast Asian and westerners?

Yes, they killed civilians hoping they will surrender.

The point is the WWII Nazis and Japanese are famous for killing / torturing people even after they surrendered.

I'm not saying others didn't, but Nazis and Japanese took it to another level than the west. (Although to be fair Sovjet Communists should be mentioned together with them.)

Yes, you are correct, Nazis and Japanese committed war crimes. And the US dropped not one, but two atomic bombs to majorly civilian population centers. Different scales, different philosophy, but mass murder of civilians just the same.

As pointed out many times - under any definition at the time, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where military targets.

On the other other Kyoto was not - and was removed because of that.

The definition of "military target" was an arbitrary definition (like most definitions) done by those who decided to bomb them. Kyoto was also a possible target favoured by the military, and it was replaced by Nagasaki.

And as you know, Hiroshima was chosen because it was undamaged and the effects of the bomb could be studied. So we can add "weapons testing on civilians" to the list of crimes.

You don’t start putting together charges unless you intend to prosecute.

The US will not be prosecuted in the future for dropping A-Bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. So what exactly is your aim?

We kind of still do.

And their leadership had shown that they were willing to sacrifice all their civilians (100MM) if it saved their emperor-military system.

How were they sacrificing the civilians that lived in the Japan island? They were just there, breathing, eating and doing their lives, not shooting soldiers or invading countries. The US decided that it was fine to burn them alive to defeat the emperor-military system.

You can argue that it was a better alternative than an invasion or some other strategy, sure. But the reality is that the civilians, who couldn't go anywhere else, were killed, en masse, by bombs dropped by the US.

>They were just there, breathing, eating and doing their lives, not shooting soldiers or invading countries.

Japan had factories, of course, but a lot of the ancillary things to war, like uniforms, etc., were made in people's homes, rice and so on was reserved for soldiers and the surplus was then distributed in the communities. The economy was massively focused on furthering the war effort --even moreso than the US.

I think you need to listen and watch Japanese programming from that era to get the picture of how involved the civilian population was in the war effort.

The US was doing exactly the same! Building planes, tanks, sending food, making uniforms and weapons. There were even food coupons. Do you think it would've been fine for Japan to attack with atomic bombs a couple of US cities? Would you consider that a mass killing of civilians?

And? If Japan could have, they would have done what they had at their disposal to neutralize us as their enemy.

War is not fine. Dropping bombs is not fine. But they would have. They had plans to build bombs for exactly that, to drop on US cities. they also had plans to engage in biological warfare on US soil. So, yes, they would have. Japan was indiscriminate when they attacked China. If they had had the ability to reach US soil, they would have waged the same here, no doubt about it at all.

Germany would have done the same too. I mean, those guys were not fooling around. Do you think the US, the UK and the SU should have taken it easy with Germany because eventually we would have won a "kinder" (no pun intended) war?

My question is: if Japan would have done that, would you consider it a war crime, or an atrocity?

We can use phrases like "neutralise the enemy", but the reality is, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in order to defeat the enemy.

War is crime. It's preposterous to frame it as not a crime. Crimes will happen in war, whether a "good" war or war on the "bad" side. War is crime. There should be no confusion about that.

In the end, would have the Japanese population suffered more with a conventional ground war vs firebombings or atomic bombings? I believe the consensus is stopping the war as quickly as possible spared the population the worst of it.

Then we agree, and that was my point, Allied bombings of mostly civilians is a crime.

Not "Allied" but all bombings, including Axis bombings of purely civilians were a crime. However, you have to make a decision do you engage or sit back and watch the larger crime happen?

In great wars like this the distinction between military and civilian is tenuous. Japan, like Germany, was thoroughly a martial economy.

If you start a fire, don't complain later you got burnt.

Just to be clear - the Japanese factories where in the cities. The Japanese pulled apart their factories and ran forges in people's backyards.

Japanese civilians in battle zones routinely walked up to Allied soldiers with grenades to blow them up. They threw themselves off cliffs rather then surrender.

We still have this concept that somehow the German and Japanese citizens where not involved in the actions of their governments. It's as much of a myth as the myth of a "Clean Wehrmacht"

Of course you have factories in cities, where would they be? They needed to be close to the workers.

And about civilians attacking Allied soldiers, do you have references for people in Tokyo, Hiroshima or Nagasaki doing it?

Commenting on the latter point:

The Battle of Okinawa seems like an example - Both willingly and by coercion, a large portion of the civilian population was sent into the battle to die with minimal training or equipment, including children.

Is there some reason to think the populations of those cities would have acted differently if the front lines came to them at that time?

No. just to be clear:

They literally disassembled their factories in many cases, and put equipment into people's houses. The broke the factories into workshops, which where highly inefficient. The Japanese believed this would make them resistant to bombing, but also scale well since they didn't have to centralize at single sites. (the exact opposite of Fordism). They were incorrect on both counts.

And no, there are no documented records of people in Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima doing it - killing people tends to make them unable to engage in further violence (though it may encourage societies to further violence). but there are records in Okinawa, and in virtually every other sizable Japanese population engaging in violence.

That even includes in Hawaii. See the Nihau incident.

Well of course civilians will fight invaders in Okinawa, it's their homeland. The Nihau incident, on the other hand, involved hawaiians, not japanese. If you consider them part of the japanese population, what about the US? How many americans from japanese descent attacked soldiers there?

About the bombings, the targeted bombing wasn't working very well because of weather, so they decided to obliterate cities with incendiary bombs, civilians and all.

But returning to mass murdering civilians to advance military objectives: what would you think of the Soviet Union destroying with atomic weapons Munich and Frankfurt, to force Hitler to an unconditional surrender? Would reducing the deaths of soviet soldiers be a good justification?

The Hawaii's where the ones attacked by the Japanese natives who were on the islands.

Your point is good - that's a isolated event - but it was a isolated event that was taken into account in the military actions that followed.

And yes. If the soviet union had destroyed munich and frankfurt (Frankfurt was the transportation hub of the western front) to force Hitler to surrender it would have been justified. To draw the full conclusion - it would not have been justified to bomb Geneva (since it wasn't a military target).

And frankly, bombing Frankfurt would have been far far less heinous then what the Red Army did to East Prussia, which could not be justified. The difference there is that the soviets had already overrun Prussia when they committed their war atrocities. Likewise, what US solders did to German PoW in more isolated circumstances.

Weird thing is Imperial Japanese system was something the country adopted as part of modernization effort over military Shogunate system. During the Edo era under Tokugawa shogunate, the country kept the borders closed with little effort being made to expand for literally multiple centuries. Only after the Meiji government was established and it made efforts to "reach and surpass Europe" the Imperial Japan stuff happened.

As a civilian, I reject the notion that I am a sheep with no responsibility for the actions of my government. Discuss.

This. Or to put it another way - Winston Churchill said this in 1901:

"The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings."

German actions and Japanese actions where enabled by the people in those countries. Less, in truth, in Japan then in Germany, but still there.

Yamamoto could have resigned.

In a democracy it's an easier position to argue.

>Frankly, I strongly recommend that people who think that there was some sort of equivilent between the Nazis and the western powers, or between the Japanese and the Americans in World War 2 put down youtube videos, and really do a deep dive into what these states were really about.

There is no moral equivalence between the allies and the axis. But even a just war can be waged unjustly by the good side. Is it really a good look to compete with the most vicious regimes in history how cruelly one can treat one's opponents, particularly those who are just caught on the wrong side? Is it collective punishment to treat an entire civilian population under military dictatorship as culpable as the members of the junta themselves? Even if it's collateral damage, under what circumstances is it justifiable to burn to death 100000 men women and children in one night? I don't see moral relativism in raising these questions at all, rather a consistent moral stance which applies the same standards to all scenarios, friend or foe.

If it's a question of "[competing] with the most vicious regimes in history how cruelly one can treat one's opponents", then the US lost very badly to Japan.

"As can be seen, nearly one out of every one-hundred people controlled by Japan [between 1937 and 1945] was murdered, or almost three per thousand people per year." (https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com