Hiroshima & Nagasaki

[OnionAhaiReborn]

To cry myself to sleep at night?
We all know, as we should know, what happened.
But do we have to torture ourselves?

 

An amazing irony that you complain of being asked to torture yourself by merely reading about actual tortures inflicted.

[Hayyoth]

A million civilians?  The total killed I've seen is between 150k and 250k killed, and some of those were military personnel.  Still a huge number, but likely lower than those killed in the Tokyo firebombing earlier in the year.

 

And yes, it was not the only option available.  But from my perspective it was the best of many bad options to make an utterly irrational military power accept defeat.  If you want to propose an alternative plan of action, feel free, but just saying "we should have done better" isn't terribly meaningful. 

The only other alternative, which wouldn't have involved the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American military personnel, would have been to blockade Japan for months or years and starve them out. All of the countering arguments, that the Japanese were terrified of Soviet invasion and were ready to surrender anyway (untrue) that they would have surrendered if we'd only given them more time (the militarists were in the ascendancy) or that a conventional invasion would have been a more humane option (again completely delusional), make no sense even with 20/20 rearview vision.

 

The Japanese gave in  when the full effect of a nuclear bomb had been demonstrated to them twice and even then only after being informed that the US had the capacity to fabricate a Nagasaki type A-bomb every other week to drop on them indefinitely.

[ElizabethB.]

An amazing irony that you complain of being asked to torture yourself by merely reading about actual tortures inflicted.

No, it wasn't a complain, I'm not sure if there's irony in it at all.
I cant simply bear to read that book. I have tried, we have read parts of it.
What good would it do even if I could?

[JonSnow4President]

Just as a pedantic nitpick, nuclear weapons aren't biological weapons.  Bio-weapons are weaponized viruses, bacteria, or even something like the potato beetle.  They have horrible, horrible consequences, but they aren't biological weapons.  

[maarsen]

Soon it will be the 78th anniversary of the Rape of Nanjing. Estimates are that up to 300,000 people died not all at once as with atomic bombs, but slowly and systematically. And if you were female and survived, you were raped. Just saying.

[awesome possum]

People are quick to forget that Japan was literally training their entire population for an invasion.  School girls received rifle training for fuck sake.  Some 28 million Japanese civilians were part of the civilian militia that would have greeted any troops stepping foot onto the Japanese mainland.  It would have been a disaster for both sides without those bombs.

[Lummel]

hmm

 

Its worth bearing in mind that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on the 9th of August, so it is not as though we can consider the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs on their own as causes of Japan's surrender.

 

The other point to consider, particularly if you are inclined to believe that strategic bombing of Japanese cities forced that country to surrender is could the war have ended sooner but for the diversion of resources to the construction of the Atom bomb - this was far more than than the cost of say another 1000 bombers which could have been constructed and in operation well before the summer of 1945.

 

In anycase the opinion of the United States Strategic Bombing survey's summary report on the Pacific war in 1946 was

There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

[The guy from the Vale]

Why did those scientists help build it in the first place? If anyone deserved punishment in the first place it was them. So for them to build it in the first place then try and stop its usage is ridiculous.

Fire bombing Japanese cities was a bigger crime than dropping the Atom bomb though.

 

The fear was that Germany would develop the bomb first, so development was pushed in order to achieve MAD. Of course, Germany was defeated before they (or the US) had finished the bomb. That's why it was used against Japan - and also why the scientists and engineers in question were against its use: Because it wasn't used for the purpose they had helped develop it.

[Trebla]

Sigh, this again. Okay, let's do this.

 

1. The "conditional surrender" that the Japanese were willing to accept? It included keeping their armed forces, keeping some of their conquered territory, conducting their own war crimes tribunals for their own people, and NO occupying troops on their home islands. Why in the flying fuck would the allies accept that? They had just finally defeated an enemy that had signed an armistice in 1918 and it took half the world to defeat it by 1945. Why would they allow another scenario where they might have to fight Japan again in 20 or 30 years?

 

2. Japan had no intention of going down easy. Their strategy in 1945 really wasn't all that different than it had been in 1941: inflict the maximum amount of casualties possible to cause your opponent or their home front to give up. The closer the Allies had gotten to Japan, the ghastlier the war had become. There were practically no surrenders. While the battles in the Eastern Front had been gigantic, hundreds of thousand surrendered and millions could fall back.  On the islands battles, there was no retreat and no surrender. The Japanese would simply do a banzai charge and die while in some cases civilians would leap to their deaths over cliffs rather than be captured by the Allies. All this pointed to horrific battles on the Home Islands.

 

3 The Allies DID know that the Japanese had no plans to accept unconditional surrender. Since before the war, the Americans had cracked the Japanese codes. In the summer of '42 they knew Japan was planning an attack but did not know where, only that the target was code-named AF. So they were able to bait the Japanese at Midway by sending a message in the clear that Midway was having water issues. Soon after the Japanese sent a coded message that AF was having issues. The U.S. carrier fleet was able to ambush the Imperial Navy at Midway and sunk all 4 Japanese carriers.

 

By 1945, the U.S had been able to continue to read the Japanese messages to and from their embassies. A few of their remaining ambassadors abroad  opined that the Japanese should agree to unconditional surrender but the War Council rebuffed them.  The Allies knew going into late summer that the Japanese would fight on and the assumption was that the coming battles would be even worse than the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

 

4. Those assumptions were correct. From what I've read, the Japanese had two million men and 10,000 planes ready to defend the home islands. The pilots of those planes had very little training but their jobs required only taking off, flying to a target, and crashing into that target. Pearl Harbor gets all the headlines for the damage done to the U.S. navy but the kamikaze at Okinawa did far more damage, sinking or crippling over 30 ships. An invasion fleet larger than the D-Day landings would have been sitting ducks for the suicide planes. Operation Downfall, the plan for the invasion of Japan, called for two major landing: Operation Olympic, the landing on Kyushu in late 1945 and Operation Olympic, the landing on Honshu in 1946. I've read that the estimates of Allied casualties was 1 million dead and wounded. These were based on the experiences of Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. If those are just Allied casualties, the Japanese would have had much, much worse. Especially since there had been several instances of civilians committing mass suicides rather than be captured..

 

People always mention that with the Soviets joining in, the Japanese would have simply surrendered but that doesn't wash with reality. Yes, the Soviets curb-stomped the Japanese in Manchuria but how exactly does that effect the coming battles in the home islands? The Soviets had replaced the Germans as the most powerful army in the world but the Soviets would have faced the same thing in Japan as the Nazis did in England: tanks don't drive on water. Like the Germans, the Soviets had no real surface fleet that could sustained a large seaborne invasion.

 

5. Finally, we have real history that points at how badly the Japanese didn't want to surrender. Little Boy and Fat Man are dropped on the Japanese and then the Soviets invade Manchuria. Pretty much all hope of finding a way to leave the war without losing face are gone. The Imperial War Council, the real power behind the throne, meet to discuss their option. The vote is split, 3 wish to surrender while 3 wish to fight on. Even after the double hammer blow of atomic bombs and Soviet invasion, the council is still split. So in an almost unheard of breach of protocol, the new Prime Minister asks the Emperor to vote. The Emperor chooses to surrender and records a radio message that will be played the next day to the public. However, those in the continue-the-war camp and their followers attempt a coup in which they will kill the 3 council members that voted for peace, take over the government, and confiscate the Emperor's recording. It only fails because one of the rebelling council members chooses to commit suicide rather than disobey the Emperor. So again, it took 2 atomic bombs, a Soviet invasion, and a failed coup d'état for the Japanese to finally unconditionally surrender. Why would you think that the Japanese would fully surrender if the Allies invaded the home islands or strangled (encircle and let the population starve) them?

 

For the record, I have seen the horror of the atomic bombs. I've seen pictures and film of Japanese children burned and crying. I've seen the civilians dying of radiation poison. I've seen pictures of civilians incinerated with nothing left but literally their shadows on the wall. But everything I've read and seen has convinced me that dropping the bombs was the best option to defeat Japan with least amount of deaths on both sides.

 

I'd recommend reading "A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II" by Gerhard L. Weinberg. A good documentary series is "World War II in HD Colour"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[The King in Black]

Please no World War III man.

[Tears of Lys]

I thought I remembered something about why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected as targets, went looking and found this excellent article in which this topic is explored.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Bombing_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki 

You may find the entire article interesting, but here is the relevant portion:

Choice of targets

The Target Committee at Los Alamos on May 10–11, 1945, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and the arsenal at Kokura as possible targets. The committee rejected the use of the weapon against a strictly military objective because of the chance of missing a small target not surrounded by a larger urban area. The psychological effects on Japan were of great importance to the committee members. They also agreed that the initial use of the weapon should be sufficiently spectacular for its importance to be internationally recognized.

The committee felt Kyoto, as an intellectual center of Japan, had a population "better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon." Hiroshima was described as "an important army depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers it is not a good incendiary target."[4]

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson struck Kyoto from the list because of its cultural significance, over the objections of General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. According to Professor Edwin O. Reischauer, Stimson "had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier."[5]

On July 25, Nagasaki was put on the target list in place of Kyoto.

Hiroshima

Hiroshima during World War II

Hiroshima was a city of considerable industrial and military significance. Military camps were located nearby, such as the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. It was one of several Japanese cities left deliberately untouched by American bombing, allowing an ideal environment to measure the damage caused by the atomic bomb. Another account stresses that after General Spaatz reported that Hiroshima was the only targeted city without prisoner of war (POW) camps, Washington decided to assign it highest priority.

The center of the city contained several reinforced concrete buildings and lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses. A few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were of wooden construction with tile roofs, and many of the industrial buildings also were of wood frame construction. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.

The population of Hiroshima had reached a peak of over 381,000 earlier in the war, but prior to the atomic bombing the population had steadily decreased because of a systematic evacuation ordered by the Japanese government. At the time of the attack the population was approximately 255,000, based on the registered population used by the Japanese in computing ration quantities, and the estimates of additional workers and troops who were brought into the city may be inaccurate.

My opinion on the matter has been formed by, of course, my homeland and my parents' reminiscences. I feel that there was little choice, given the circumstances, but hope and pray that such circumstances never, ever arise again, for God help us all if they do.

[DanteGabriel]

My opinion on the matter has been formed by, of course, my homeland and my parents' reminiscences. I feel that there was little choice, given the circumstances, but hope and pray that such circumstances never, ever arise again, for God help us all if they do.

 

Coming from a country that suffered under Japanese rule, with a mother who was born under-weight and malnourished because her family was hiding in the hills from the Japanese, and my uncle almost beheaded at the age of 12 by kill-crazy Imperial army soldiers, my own opinion is highly colored as well. I doubt you'd find many people from East Asia who are wringing their hands over what it took to bring down the racist rapist baby-bayonetting Imperial Army. Especially now that their current nationalist government is trying to deny and whitewash the crimes their army committed.

[Fez]

I'm not going to go all the way into this again, just going to quickly say: Dropping the bombs was the right thing to do. In fact, it was the humane thing to do. It ended the war much quickly and had a net impact of saving lives.

[Jaxom 1974]

http://www.pbs.org/program/bomb/

Watch this show. If you haven't already caught it.

[Red Tiger]

Yeah I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as say it was the least shitty of many shitty options.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

Sigh, this again. Okay, let's do this.

 

1. The "conditional surrender" that the Japanese were willing to accept? It included keeping their armed forces, keeping some of their conquered territory, conducting their own war crimes tribunals for their own people, and NO occupying troops on their home islands. Why in the flying fuck would the allies accept that? They had just finally defeated an enemy that had signed an armistice in 1918 and it took half the world to defeat it by 1945. Why would they allow another scenario where they might have to fight Japan again in 20 or 30 years?

 

 

Yeah. Their demands were pretty ridiculous. It would have been like accepting a peace with Hitler in 1944 in exchange for him just giving back France and Poland, and then returning to business as usual. In fact even with their eventual unconditional surrender they got off way easier than Germany did. 

 

The atomic bombings were definitely serious war crimes, but WW2 was an incredibly brutal war all around and there really was no reasonable way for the allies to win it legally. You get such big advantages from not playing by any rules in war that, unless your enemy is orders of magnitude stronger than you, he pretty much has to abandon certain principles of his own to be able to win. The laws even take this into account to at least some degree, hence why for example people not fighting in uniforms (such as guerillas and certain special forces) aren't covered by the protections in the Geneva convention. 

 

One way to possibly deal with Japan that wouldn't have involved a massive invasion or literally starving them out might (with countless dead Japanese as a result) have been to let them import food and so on, but otherwise making them a total pariah in regard to trade and foreign relations. Like North Korea today. But honestly, even though it could have saved some lives I doubt it would have been doing the Japanese a favor in the long run compared to today. 

[TerraPrime]

But honestly, even though it could have saved some lives I doubt it would have been doing the Japanese a favor in the long run compared to today. 

 

lol

 

ok

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

 

lol

 

ok

 

 As ridiculous as that may sound, I think there is some creedence to that thought. The Japanese occupation/reconstruction was probably the most favorable post-war occupation in like the history of ever. I think that the guilt over having inflicted such a horror upon its' populace probably had something to do with that.

[Tears of Lys]

I know that at least some of you have seen these pictures before (safe for work,) but they never fail to astonish - me, at least.

BTW, By posting these pictures,I'm not intending to imply that being bombed into oblivion is a "good" thing nor that I think the lives that were lost were worth it to rebuild such a beautiful, glittering city. My main feeling is more one of irony - here's Detroit, so instrumental in providing the wheels that so much of the allied forces ran on - including Russia - almost 70 years later.

Take particular note of the dilapidated building with the pillars. That's the train station from which thousands of young men left their homes to fight, and too often die, in WW2.

http://www.angelfire.com/ca4/yourturf2/HiroshimaandDetroit.htm

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

 

lol

 

ok

Sorry, I forgot that North Korea is best Korea.