Former Hiroshima Branch of the Bank of Japan
peace-tourism.com
peace-tourism.com
I also recommend the book “The Story of World War 2” as likely the best single book to understand the tragedy and complexity of the war, as well as what the Allies fought for and against[2].
Let us hope humanity never fights such a war again.
1. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-42-blitz-...
2. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Story_of_World_War_...
After Japan surrendered, there was a sudden shift in roles as the soldiers packed up and prepared to return the the USA. At one point, with little to do, he was offered a ride on a plane that was heading over to the mainland of Japan for some reason. He got to see Hiroshima and Tokyo, spending some time on the ground and interacting with a few Japanese citizens there. My father passed away a couple of years ago and I wish that my brother and I could have recorded his accounts of some of these things.
Much more nuanced account of the history and mindset that lead to the war and sustained it than most of the responses here would indicate.
As a child in the US, my understanding was that we warned people to leave and anyone that stayed was considered an enemy combatant. Now that I'm older I doubt that narrative is true; especially given the endless lies and gaslighting the US Govt uses on its own people.
Papers were dropped across the entire country warning Japan to give up. But that’s like Russia warning the entirety of Ukraine that they’re going to destroy them then acting like nuking Kiev is justified because civilians had fair warning.
It’s not hard to even find the papers online that were dropped, but there’s a lot of revisionism online that actively defends nuking civilian targets these days. Mentioning the fact the warning claim isn’t accurate gets immediate downvotes and angry comments everywhere online. Even Wikipedia specifically mentions Hiroshima wasn’t listed, and the papers are publicly available and mention only cities that aren’t Hiroshima, so I’m not sure why people get outraged.
The bald facts are the USofA had already performed overnight raids on 72 cities in Japan and completely levelled them.
The Tokyo firebombing saw tens of thousands of civilian deaths, a similar number to the deaths in Hiroshima.
In Japan at the time bombing raids were expected to strike anywhere and everywhere built up urban | industrial areas existed.
Japan is a very, very narrow country. “Cities” are basically just a naming convention. Everything from Nagasaki to Tokyo is, frankly, one continuous urban and industrial area. There’s no place that’s more than a brief drive from a dense populated area along that entire corridor.
I don't know how true that was in 1940. My understanding is that much of that sprawl developed as they rebuilt all the cities that had been bombed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182
This enormous cultural destruction was averted because the US Secretary of War had taken his honeymoon in Kyoto decades earlier. Presumably he had no such emotional connection to the innocents killed in Nagasaki.
Esp since civilians were the main casualties and they could afford to shop around for locations.
Like WTF.
The Japanese had sufficient time to surrender after the first nuke was dropped.
The second was apparently what was required for them to capitulate. The loss of life (on both sides) from an invasion would have been at least an order of magnitude greater.
One terrible action to avoid a prolonged much larger loss of life. I don't envy the people who had to make that difficult decision but it is clear they made the correct one.
Esp since both nukes and fire bombings did far more damage to civilians structures at that point.
Even if you ignore the wanton destruction, Russia flipping over to allies and cornering Japan by that time would have been enough to destroy Japanese moral as much as the fire bombings did.
So really the excess use of force by that time wasn't really needed, and trying to justify it now sounds like making poor excuses at revisionism.
Imagine you’re Truman or a General who has watched countless Allied and Japanese die in the war. How exactly would you get an enemy like that to surrender if you’re not willing to deliver a couple knockout punches?
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaf...
This says that the Nagasaki leaflets may not have made it to Nagasaki until after the bomb was dropped. The leaflets that may have been dropped before the Hiroshima bomb (“LeMay leaflets”) did not reference the atomic bomb. You also have to be aware that the US had been carpet bombing Tokyo for years by this point. People were used to bombs, just not to the atomic bomb.
We grew up with the idea of atomic bombs but for people in 1945, seeing the destruction that it caused for the first time in human history must have been truly shocking.
The destruction it caused was on par with conventional overnight HE+incendiary raids already carried for months across Japan and previously across Germany prior to German surrender.
From photographs and M&M stats alone it would be difficult to seperate destruction in Hiroshima from that in Tokyo.
Those directly killed and injured and those indirectly killed and injured.
Water and food supplies were disrupted and polluted, infections followed, etc.
As someone else linked and as I stated the scale of each event was very similar.
See also Kurt Vonnegut's accounts of the Dresden firebombing he lived through as a US PoW in Europe some months earlier.
LeMay and his ilk were monsters, eager to rain destruction down with any tool available.
The two tests (Hiroshima & Nagasaki) were squeezed into an long ongoing campaign that had already "deleted" 72 cities .. at a time when the conventional campaign was already running out of good targets.
The atomic bombs had been developed at great expense to use on Germany and were not yet ready to test when Germany surrended.
Those military at the head of the Manhatten Project were desperate to find live theatre test sites before Japan surrended to either the US or, god forbid, the Russians (who had advanced so far through the formerly Japanese occupied terrirory in China that Japanee surrender to Russia was considered a very real possibility at the time).
While the Project had the ability to painstakingly handcraft more bombs at a low rate (and at very very great expense), they had not yet developed the Cold War production line ability to reliably turn out hundreds more bombs.
It's well worth reading up on the thoughts of the time before the after the fact post surrender stories spun up and atomic weapon use became a key part of the Cold War zeitgeist.
//off topic: plus plus to the current Japanese government, and their support for Ukraine.
It is impossible to disentangle the events. The Soviets declared war on Aug 8, Nagasaki was Aug 9, surrender was proposed by Japan on Aug 10. It was the totality of events that finally caused Japan to surrender. The Japanese Supreme Council was split on surrender even after Nagasaki and USSR invading Manchuria.
Here is a quotation from Seal Kido, who was a leader in the peace faction in Japan.
On the eve of the atomic attacks, the peace faction’s influence was becoming strong enough to constitute a counterweight against the war faction; and the atomic bombs drastically reduced the sway of the war faction, and the peace faction gained momentum. In addition, the Soviet declaration of war further reduced the dominance of the war faction and gave the peace faction the upper hand. Therefore, I think that the atomic bombs alone could have allowed us to terminate the war. However, the Soviet Union’s entry into the war certainly made it easier [for us]. It is difficult to tell which event contributed more to the termination of the war: the atomic bombs or the Soviet Union’s declaration of war.
Yea they did. The US had already bombed most big cities killing hundreds of thousands. The other cities were actively preparing for the same to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2g9QZvHTuk
hmm i dunno always considered it to be one of the most horrifying things i've ever seen
There is some historical evidence that the US dropped leaflets warning about the impending bombings and the atomic bombs specifically. For info, Google "LeMay leaflets." It's also likely that the US made AM radio broadcasts about it. Even so, I'm sure the Japanese citizenry would have regarded it as the enemy propaganda it was and largely ignored the messages. And of course no one could have anticipated or imagined the atomic bombs.
I imagine there’s a level of, “but if we didn’t invade, they would have attacked us.” But we hear that from every belligerent.
This is sure to have potential to be a… fun conversation. So I’ll leave it at this: there is plenty of subjectivity in how one might decide to measure success. This might not be the best example. I’m not really interested to litigate this this morning. =)
I see it more as "let's attack Britain while they're busy in Europe" than offensive defense. The US banked on France winning in Europe, lost the bet, and still gained Florida in the deal. Not a win, but not really a loss.
So I think that in the context they simply didn't care about minimising casualties, perhaps even the opposite. They wanted to show that they now had a weapon that made annihilating a whole city much more efficient and practical, and that they were going to use it until Japan surrendered.
I personally believe doing this is morally no different from just dropping the bomb without warning. Because nobody expected the warning to be taken seriously. Because there was no precedent, because the bomb was developed in complete secrecy, because there was no proof or demonstration to the Japanese government that the claim is real for them to take it seriously.
It is essentially just looking for an excuse for your actions without really honestly trying to avoid using the bomb and deter your enemy. There is a lot alternative ways US could use those bombs without dropping them on densely populated areas.
They could drop it on an unpopulated area and tell "we have more of these". They could drop it on any military installation or grouping of forces that is a bit further away from a populated city. They could explain they have the bomb and invite a representative for a demonstration.
At this point Japan had no capability to prevent US from overflying its territory so it is not like Japanese could do anything to prevent the bomb dropped. Knowing a bomb so powerful was developed and ready they would have no choice but surrender.
Instead US chose to send a signal to everybody at the cost of tens of thousand of lives that were lost only for the purpose of making that signal so much more powerful.
Telling Japanese to evacuate was really completely meaningless move with no moral implications.
The counter argument would be that, if what you have written is true, then Japan would've surrendered before the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki. The surrender didn't happen till days after the second bomb, an invasion by the Soviets, and a coup d'état that, if it had succeeded, would've meant no surrender at all. Some of the "big six" in command of Japan's forces were either so delusional to think they could still win regardless of the situation, or that they didn't mind fighting until obliteration came. They were not rational actors.
I'm glad to see this brought up. This is almost always left out of these discussions, lead or influenced by people who are sympathetic to Japan or critical of America, including most American public school teachers. Awareness of this coup is almost nonexistent in America among those who profess to know something about Japanese willingness to surrender.
After the SECOND atomic bomb was dropped, there were still many in the leadership of the IJA that didn't want to surrender and made a real attempt to prevent it, even managing to place the Emperor under house arrest. The only reason they failed is because the surrender message was smuggled out of the building and they didn't have a critical mass of men willing to go along with the coup, but that was after two cities were subjected to atomic bombing. Those saying things like "oh America was so mean, they should have just demonstrated the bombs on the ocean or something" are naive and mislead. Even after personally witnessing the severe and prolonged fire bombing of Tokyo, IJA officers in Tokyo weren't ready to surrender. In fact 'strategic bombing' has never ended a war, with the exception of those two atomic bombs. You can firebomb a city to charred rubble and it will only strengthen their resolve to fight. Only the psychological shock of single bombs gutting cities was able to have this effect.
Hindsight is 20/20. We do know that it was expected that Japanese will be fighting to the bitter end and it will be difficult to get them to capitulate. But it is not possible to predict the future exactly -- who is to say that the same course of action could not happen after a powerful demonstration without actually dropping bombs on large cities?
If you start taking future as excuse for the past you could come to some extreme conclusions.
For some reason the critical lens of “anti police action” has not been applied to the Japan conflict, in the same way it has been to, say, Vietnam. This inconsistency is what I’m interested in.
I speculate that if the pacific conflict was a standalone war that this lens would be more likely to have been applied by now.
WW2 is not this situation, and it's an anachronism to analyze it as such. Pearl Harbor was followed by a string of other US defeats. For a while, it looked like Japan would set up an empire from Alaska to Australia. You don't have the luxury of deciding to hold back in a situation where all your efforts might not be enough.
Regarding Asia, I think "to acquire territory" is not the real question. Most Americans today would say that we should assist staunch allies such as South Korea if they were invaded, without any desire to acquire their territory. That goes more for the Philippines in 1941, since the US had given them a 10-year security guarantee under the 1934 Philippine Independence Act.
Japan’s pacific colonisation and surprise attack on the US are already frowned upon, the US’s use of nuclear weapons is also generally frowned on. The only part that I think people generally agree with is the US fighting Japan to push back their empire.
Please. If anything you have it completely backwards; the American public were ambivalent to German imperialism until Japan attacked America. Then Germany declared war on America.
My country would have been stuck in the stone age forever. It's a good thing we don't start wars.
That is still the case in Japan. There is a big fire in the news every single day, and when a house burns, they burn down completely, with only a smoldering pile of ashes remaining. I have never seen something similar in Europe.