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Comment by karlgkk | Hacker News Reader

The atrocities that the Japanese military committed, consistently and repeatedly and combined with their attack on pearl harbor, meant that Americans of the time on the front lines had few qualms or issues with dropping the bomb.

Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand.

Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.

I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.

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> Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.

Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell speech, said of the bombing in his memoir:

> I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. [...] I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [...] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives

I vacationed in Japan a few months ago via a tour group and we went to Hiroshima. It was one of the most emotionally-taxing experiences of my life. The bomb was literally dropped on a hospital [2]. The heat of the explosion melted the tops of headstones in a neighboring graveyard and seared some poor soul's shadow into the nearby steps that they were sitting on. Hundreds of thousands of civilians' lives were erased or permanently altered in a matter of seconds. Grabbing a sandwich from the 7-11 next door and eating it while I stared at where it all happened 80 years prior definitely fucked with me a bit.

I've never experienced war or lost somebody I care about to an enemy combatant. All things considered I've led a rather easy life. I can't say how I'd feel otherwise, but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did. That they haven't done it again makes me wonder whether they realize this too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shima_Hospital

but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did.

It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.

If you go sufficiently far back in history, this is true for every event.

> you might not have the life you do now.

I mean, yeah. The act is one of many countably infinite quantum events that contribute to the reality that I experience. My point is that there's a strong argument to be made that the US not dropping the bomb would have resulted in largely the same state of the universe with significantly less suffering in it.

Maybe? We can go around in circles on this but there were so many other options the Allies could have tried:

- Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response

- Blockade the island, threaten land invasion, and wait for the emperor to call for surrender as they gradually run out of fuel

- Drop a bomb on Hiroshima but give more than 3 days for the government to understand what happened and consider surrendering before dropping a bomb on Nagasaki

- Allow the USSR to go ahead with a ground invasion while the US sits on the sidelines

etc...

But sure, in the fine grained detail, if the US has not dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, we would not today be commenting on Hiroshima (1946) saying "they shouldn't have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan"

Keep in mind that every day the war continued meant thousands of innocent lives being lost under the brutal Japanese occupation that still covered vast areas of east Asia. Blockading Japan and waiting for them to starve might have been the best thing to save American lives. I think it’s unlikely to have been the best thing to save innocent lives overall.

Blockading Japan would have probably killed countless Japanese civilians via starvation, right? At least, I don’t think the island could sustain itself at that population level, particularly without fuel…

The aerial mining operation was literally called Operation Starvation, so, yeah. The big question is how quickly it makes them surrender. If they decide they’re cooked and give up fast, it might not have been too bad. If they hold out a long time then it would have been terrible.

Given how ideological they were? It would take 5 mil dead at least.

A blockade would mean a slow death for thousands or potentially millions of Japanese, as well at the cost and risk of tens of thousands of American troops, as well as a stupid amount of resources and infrastructure.

The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it."

That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.

> - Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response

Seventy scientists on the Manhattan Project signed a petition [0] to president Truman about doing something like that before actually using the bomb, but the petition was intercepted and Truman didn't even hear about it in time.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition

> Allow the USSR to go ahead with a ground invasion while the US sits on the sidelines

Geopolitics 101 from HN.

I'm not suggesting this is would have been a good idea or had good outcomes. I mention it specifically because I frequently hear the false-dichotomy (from Americans in particular) that "we had to use nuclear bombs because a ground invasion would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives". I rarely if ever hear them say that "we had to use nuclear bombs because we didn't want the USSR to invade Japan before they surrendered".

That is to say, I think it's important to hear the argument against this alternative explicitly raised as a justification for the use of nuclear weapons, because ignoring that motivation is intellectually dishonest.

>..I rarely if ever hear them say that "we had to use nuclear bombs because we didn't want the USSR to invade Japan before they surrendered".

People rarely say that because there is little evidence for it - it was the USA that was pressuring Stalin to declare war on Japan. Little Boy was dropped on Aug 6, the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan on Aug 9 as they agreed to at Yalta. (While the Soviets considered invading Hokkaido after Japan surrendered, very few people think they would have succeeded. The USA had given the Soviet Union some ships that could be used, but they would not have been nearly enough.)

Maybe, but it's a very uncomfortable precedent to say that sometimes burning a lot of civilians alive is acceptable.

Hell, if America breaks out in civil war...

I don't think a lot of the other things the Japanese did during WW2 were acceptable either.

Nor was attacking Pearl Harbor.

Not really. The war was practically over, and we could just have blockaded Japan until it surrendered without invading. And the Soviets' entrance in the war did as much, if not more to push the surrender as the atomic bombs.

You say “blockade” without thinking about the consequences.

The US blockades Japan causing food shortages. The military prioritizes what little food is available for themselves. The know the population will starve, but it’s necessary to defend Japan against the foreign Invaders. As long as there is enough food for the military, the war can continue.

Now you have a mass famine where millions of women and children slowly starve to death. Japan uses it for propaganda showing how cruel the West is and how if the West would just sign an armistice leaving the military junta in charge, all these people could be saved.

Is that better?

Sadly we've all seen this unfold in current times.

I was responding to:

> It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.

My response was not wrong as to that. The Allies did care a great deal about the Japanese people, and you can see that in the Potsdam declaration, but they also cared about their own soldiers' lives. If we hadn't had, or did not want to use, the nukes, then maybe we might have tried blockading for a while, who knows -- it's what the then leadership surely would have considered, and you can't blame someone today for mentioning it.

I find it is important to be skeptical of people's descriptions of what they were supposedly thinking years earlier. Much better is to find contemporaneous accounts. For example:

>...my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,

The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.

>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...

Don't forget the thousands of civilians that committed suicide. There are accounts of soldier interpreters pleading with civilians through loudspeakers on their ship to just surrender and be taken care of, while they jumped from cliffs into the sea. Every option (invasion, mass starvation via blockade, atomic bombing) was a horrific nightmare of death for the Japanese.

> Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

On a strategic level they were. The archipelago was being blockaded, they had no way to contest Allied air supremacy, they were reduced to send children into battle, etc.

Yes, they had no chance of winning and it should have been obvious long before Okinawa. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean they were ready to surrender.

> the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives

FYI it is estimated that the war would go on until 1947 if the bombs were not dropped. There would be millions of American lives lost in that case.

> FYI it is estimated that the war would go on until 1947 if the bombs were not dropped

FYI it is also estimated that the war would end within a few months if the bombs were not dropped. It really depends on whoever was estimating lol

This is a heavily contested issue that has been actively discussed for almost a century by full time professional historians and analysts. Making confident assertions isn’t particularly helpful

What is the argument that the war would have ended in a few months? Is it that the US would have reached Tokyo by then? Or Japan would have surrendered before then? Both are hard to believe

The core point of my post has not sunk in. Your personal belief does not mean that you get to confidently issued judgment on this matter, as if there are no other perspectives.

Again, this is a hotly contested issue, contested by people who in some cases, have a full-time profession in studying this issue

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

> I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.

They were concerned about Japanese lives. They were more concerned about American lives, but they concluded the shorter the war was the more lives of everyone involved could be saved.

The Japanese food situation was also very dire: there was a very real risk of famine during Winter 1945-46, and so if the war could be ended before that many millions of Japanese civilians could be saved.

I agree. With the information they had at the time it made total sense to drop the bomb. After seeing how tough the Japanese military fought during the invasion of the various islands it was reasonable to assume that the invasion of the mainland would be extremely bloody.

I think whatever we learned (I have read that Japan was already ready to surrender). after should be applied to future wars but not be applied to situations where the information was not available.

If anybody is responsible for Japanese suffering it’s clearly Hirohito and his generals who were too cowardly to accept defeat and instead chose to have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese while they were hesitating.

My favorite terrifying fact about the WW2 Pacific theater: The US expected that invading the Japanese home islands would be so bloody that they manufactured tons of Purple Heart medals, and they’re still giving them out today because they haven’t run out.

That is the terrifying fact, and I can confirm it. It was mentioned in a large volume on World war II.

"Japan was ready to surrender." It was not. The military, was ready to fight to the last man,and that was the resistance that Hirohito had to over come. And why there were 4 cabinets that the Emperor had to go though. A thuough understanding about what was actually occuring would help you understand. Read Hirohito's book.

Hirohito surendered, and insisted on doing so, that he would spare the lives and culture of the japanese people, and TO SPARE LIVES IN GENERAL.

The generals went scorched earth and they plan would have killed 20~22 million japanese people, that is what it means to fight to the last man.

Clearly, you need to read Hirohito's book.

Hirohito surendered his divinity, and instead of his people calling him a coward, they continued to worship him, in a way very few non-japanese can understand. Two of my best friends in school were japanese, and when I got to Jr high, my counselor had the internment order on his wall. I hated that the US dropped the bomb for decades, until I read Hirohito's book. Then it mostly fell into place, and I had to check with a bunch of historians, and with the senior members of the peace organization. I belonged to for decades.

I find it a little questionable to make Hirohito the victim and hero of this story.

The problem is that the Americans saw no difference between soldiers committing atrocities and old people and children living in a city (fight aged men were out fighting).

They were targeting old people and children because it was easier to kill them than the soldiers.

The please explain why Kyoto was taken off the lists of targets?

Because the secretary of war spent his honeymoon there and didn't want to tarnish his memory.

Sorry they didn’t invent HIMARS and satellite precision strikes yet.

I sometimes feel many Americans are relatively unconcerned about lives of foreign civilians. Still.

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