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U.S. leaders knew we didn’t have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway (LA Times)
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In general, there's never going to be a 100% confirmed accounting of how the various options on the table would have worked out or not. Can't A/B test history.
By 1945, we've essentially baked in the idea that Japanese people are fanatics for the Emperor and will go down to the last child if they have to (and there were factions within the military who wanted that, including an attempted coup to stop the surrender). So we've now turned our populace (and generals are no exception) into racists (well, more racist) who can't fathom a Japanese surrender without a major show of force (either mainland invasion or the bombs).
Then you have sketchy information transfer. No cell phones, people are wiring in telegrams in code and shorthand, with long delays between information exchanges. Sometimes codes get intercepted but not always. Japan did send a message to the Soviets on July 21st that they could not accept unconditional surrender, and that message was supposedly intercepted by the Allies. Did they believe that? Was it a bluff by Japan? Did we miss a message or misunderstand what we intercepted?
Again, can't A/B test it.
How do you beat nazi Germany without bombing them though. There's no way out of this madness.
I hate these conversations because there is one crucial thing that is ALWAYS not discussed. This is the map of the Pacific theatre the day the Japanese surrendered:
People on both sides of the argument weighing the lives of Japanese and Americans when no one talks about the lives of the people in these occupied areas. Each day of occupation meant more murders, rapes and tortures at the hands of Imperial Japan. Hell, Unit 731 was operating in China up until the day of the surrender, performing live vivisections on people. When they received news of the surrender of the Japanese government, they killed the people they had captured in an effort to hide their war crimes. None of these people in these areas deserved to be occupied a single extra day. I don't know whether the bombing was justified or not, but these people's lives mattered too and need to be part of the conversation.
People on both sides of the argument weighing the lives of Japanese and Americans when no one talks about the lives of the people in these occupied areas. Each day of occupation meant more murders, rapes and tortures at the hands of Imperial Japan. Hell, Unit 731 was operating in China up until the day of the surrender, performing live vivisections on people. When they received news of the surrender of the Japanese government, they killed the people they had captured in an effort to hide their war crimes. None of these people in these areas deserved to be occupied a single extra day. I don't know whether the bombing was justified or not, but these people's lives mattered too and need to be part of the conversation.
Yeah, truth is a grey area in the middle of what would've happened without the bomb drops.
It is somewhat telling though the Japanese didn't surrender within 24 hours after the first drop though, showing the military was still fighting back even with the terrible destruction.
Now this may be a very cold take, but I also think Japan might have saved the world here by experiencing the brunt of these weapons, as if they were not dropped and seen first hand, it is very possible their "first usage" may have been seen during the cold war at a much larger and destructive scale, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Edit: Also the Tokyo fire bombings get completely forgotten by the general public due to these atomic bombings, which were way worse on casualties.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that Japan and their axis allies were invading foreign nations and committing genocide on a level never seen before or since and the allied powers were trying to put a stop to them?
Maybe people are willing to justify heinous actions for an ultimately good goal rather than you know, genocide?
It's hard to suss out the history at this point, but I do wonder what the cold war would have looked like without the verifiable evidence of the effects of radiation on people etc that came from those bombs. It will never be justifiable but who knows how history would have turned out
Then it's ok to wipe cities if the government decides to invade other countries? good to know
Yeah, this is what I don't get about these arguments. War is hell, millions of civilians were dying already through conventional means and somehow because it was done with one special bomb it's somehow worse?
How else do you propose to end a war?
I think more importantly is that most of the leaders of WW2 fought/ were involved in WW1. Conditional surrender during WW1 was one of the main reasons leading to WW2 so they sure as hell were not going to make the same mistake.
Stab-in-the-back myth - Wikipedia
The Allies were going to make sure everyone in the Axis countries knew they lost completely.
I saw a video on this (I can look it up if you want) that further goes into the role of the Soviet invasion. It wasn't just that Japan couldn't withstand an invasion, it was also that Japan had been in talks with Russia, so Stalin could negotiate on the Japanese behalf, so they could surrender on favorable terms. When Russia joined the allied forces, that also meant a favorable out the Japanese were hoping/waiting for was gone. With that option gone, and an invasion in the near future, they had no other options than to surrender.
Yes, the US just didn't want a communist Japan. You know, a little bit of genocide to avoid the red menace.
Is the implication here that had the USSR not entered the war, the Japanese would have thought they had a chance at victory against the US?
I never gave my opinion on what I think is justifiable or not. All I said is that it's far easier to justify something that is being done in order to stop mass genocide compared to something being done to aid said genocide.
It seems to argue against unconditional surrender which I don't find very convincing. Unconditional surrender was the correct path and I don't think the onus was on the allies to give Japan an easier offramp due to their history of aggressive empire building. I also don't see why we would go to Allied leaders for the answer when we can just ask the Japanese leaders who made the decision. Let's see what they have to say.
These are just accessible quotes from Wikipedia but you can find arguments either way to support both positions. Personally I don't think Japan would've surrendered as quickly with just the Soviet declaration of war. The shock was one bomb destroying an entire city directly on the homeland and then knowing the enemy has multiple and it's not just a one off is much more convincing than an army getting routed in Manchuria. They've been losing battles since Midway without surrendering. Germany didn't surrender until Berlin had fallen and their leader was dead and I don't think anyone would call the Japanese in World War II less tenacious or fanatical fighters.
I also think that later Japanese attempts to push the idea that the Soviets were the primary reason for their surrender are to further prop up the idea of their victimhood and pivot away from their own victims, the primary reasons for the whole conflict started by their own aggressive actions and invasions, and the truly horrifying war crimes the Japanese empire was committing up to the last moment.
These are just accessible quotes from Wikipedia but you can find arguments either way to support both positions. Personally I don't think Japan would've surrendered as quickly with just the Soviet declaration of war. The shock was one bomb destroying an entire city directly on the homeland and then knowing the enemy has multiple and it's not just a one off is much more convincing than an army getting routed in Manchuria. They've been losing battles since Midway without surrendering. Germany didn't surrender until Berlin had fallen and their leader was dead and I don't think anyone would call the Japanese in World War II less tenacious or fanatical fighters.
I also think that later Japanese attempts to push the idea that the Soviets were the primary reason for their surrender are to further prop up the idea of their victimhood and pivot away from their own victims, the primary reasons for the whole conflict started by their own aggressive actions and invasions, and the truly horrifying war crimes the Japanese empire was committing up to the last moment.
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Literal crime against humanity that will most likely lead to the end of civilization eventually if capitalism doesn't beat it to the punch.
I think it's more complicated than this.
As true as this was, isn't the bomb drops also an experiment of their own? There was nothing heroic about the bombs.I hate these conversations because there is one crucial thing that is ALWAYS not discussed. This is the map of the Pacific theatre the day the Japanese surrendered:
People on both sides of the argument weighing the lives of Japanese and Americans when no one talks about the lives of the people in these occupied areas. Each day of occupation meant more murders, rapes and tortures at the hands of Imperial Japan. Hell, Unit 731 was operating in China up until the day of the surrender, performing live vivisections on people. When they received news of the surrender of the Japanese government, they killed the people they had captured in an effort to hide their war crimes. None of these people in these areas deserved to be occupied a single extra day. I don't know whether the bombing was justified or not, but these people's lives mattered too and need to be part of the conversation.
Not really. Reducing complex historical situations down to driveby one liners doesn't help clarify the discussion at all. If this were as black and white it wouldn't still be discussed half a century later with all the same sources used/referenced in every previous discussion of it
Dropping the atomic bombs has to regarded as the wrong move intrinsically. If we accept that their use was justified that means that we have acceptable uses of atomic weapons in warfare, specifically acceptable uses against non-atomic countries. That has to be a hard no regardless of other circumstances.
Try this thought experiment: pick any other historical war and send the winning side two atomic weapons a few months before the negotiated surrender. The winning side will pick two cities/population centers of the losing side and the bombs will drop on those cities, ending the war immediately a few months early. Which war and which cities do you choose?
Try this thought experiment: pick any other historical war and send the winning side two atomic weapons a few months before the negotiated surrender. The winning side will pick two cities/population centers of the losing side and the bombs will drop on those cities, ending the war immediately a few months early. Which war and which cities do you choose?
Still amazing that after all the horrific atrocities Japan committed, many of their leaders went unpunished after the war. And they were allowed to rewrite their own history to such a laughable degree that many in Japan had no clue that Japan were the aggressors. Nothing will ever justify killing civilians with atomic weapons though. Winning the war or not, that should still have been a war crime.
My grandparents served in WWII, in command positions. What they always conveyed to me (and what I've read for years) was the fear from allied command was the invasion of the Japanese mainland to stop the war would have involved catastrophic amounts of casualties. It was a horrible war of attrition just to get close to Japan. Island hopping and a possible invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been devastating to the US and to Japan in terms of lives lost.
Not to mention what would happen to the people of the islands Japan had invaded. Look up a map of what the occupation in the pacific theater looked like. It's worth studying and reading about what happened to the people on those islands.
While we can debate NOW if the bomb should be dropped, the prevailing thought at the time of the bombings was "This is THE way to stop the war", without having to invade mainland Japan. An invasion of mainland Japan would cost even more lives via attacks, fire bombings, etc.
And, to bossattack's point here, assuming the Japanese would surrender after a Soviet invasion is predicated on the loss of even more lives. There was no easy answer here.
You have to remember that this was after Hitler rolled Europe. This was in a time when the holocaust had happened, people were being drafted and were dying to stop an invasion force that wanted to remake the world. The USA as a whole had assumed a war time posture that was draining to its citizens both in lives and resources. There was a fear that things would never be okay because Nazi Germany was such a monumental threat to the world.
Once Germany was defeated, you can understand the desire to do whatever was necessary to stop the war with the Empire of Japan. Doesn't mean in hindsight it was the right choice to drop the bombs, but context absolutely matters here. It's very easy to monday-morning-quarterback this issue when we weren't there in and we're judging this with 77 years of hindsight.
Dropping the atomic bomb was undoubtedly the most consequential act in human history. Oppenheimer was undoubtably the most important and consequential man that ever lived. What he was involved in creating and what has been wrought with the atomic bomb will shape the course of human history as long as we exist.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a horrible and the death and destruction from those bombings will always be part of the fabric of the world. There's a lot of nuisance to the horror of World War II and I think Monday-morning-quarterbacking it 77 years later misses a lot of that nuisance, as well as the context needed to understand why these decisions were made.
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Have you ever heard of the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right?" I think it especially applies to war crimes. You know, the things you should never do period, even if someone did them to you or your allies first.
In reference to, "the Japanese were going to surrender after the Soviets killed more Japanese during an invasion" --- the point is that because the Japanese already had Manchuria invaded and lost, they were panicking and likely to surrender prior to any invasion of their islands because they were so afraid of losing any ounce of homeland Japan. There didn't have to be a massive loss of life added on top of what had happened. Japan was done by this point. They were actively seeking peace, then had their largest remaining ground force pulverized by the very people they were using to mediate for peace. With no active outgoing campaigns, and no supply to carry any out even if they wanted, the United States didn't have to throw people into any further invasions to lose lives. And that's part of the issue with a lot of the framing around the necessity also---it's based on a false assumption the United States had to keep throwing soldiers into a meat grinder and they didn't.
One person who rarely gets brought up as a specific person to blame a lot of this on is Truman's Secretary of State James F. Byrnes. Byrnes' biggest political contribution after leaving the Truman admin was opposing the desegregation of schools in South Carolina while he was governor and criticizing Brown v Board of Education. He also supported Goldwater, Nixon, Harry Byrd, and Strom Thurmond, just to give an idea of how racist he was.
Even if this is the case, it paints America in a very bad light since the implication is that we simply can't help ourselves from nuking someone at some point.
True, most of bullshit America pulled to stop communism in Japan was during the "reverse course" of the occupation when they gave war criminals like Shinzo Abe's grandad their jobs back.
There were other reasons, pretty much all of them grounded in cold, ruthless realpolitik. I just chose to focus on this one reason, I'm not required to go over all of them.
The bottom line of this shitstorm is that, as usual, it was the civilians that paid the price. The actual evil, disgusting people responsible for the overzealous and unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, AND those responsible for the atrocities committed by the Japanese army mostly went unpunished.
That's the real travesty.
That's the real travesty.
Ok so genuine question, why wouldn't the US just use nukes in the aftermath of WW2 then? I find it extremely unlikely if not impossible the US doesn't drop a nuke at some point, and if it wasn't against Germany or Japan, it would be against the USSR as a show of force or to tell them to get out of the occupied land they grabbed.
Either the bombs get dropped in Japan and history continues as normal, or the US use it against the USSR right after WW2 to force demands.
Either the bombs get dropped in Japan and history continues as normal, or the US use it against the USSR right after WW2 to force demands.
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Not to derail, but something does occur to me from this discussion. Supposing we never used the bombs during WW2, would MAD have been as effective a deterrent if the very first time anyone did use a nuclear weapon in anger was after multiple sides possessed them?
It was war. We as the people with the weapon to end the war get to choose the terms of how it should end. This was after one of the most brutal periods in human history. The Japanese don't, and didn't, get the right to a conditional surrender just because they were the last ones standing. A war with America, mind you that they started, because they needed more oil to rape and pillage China.
You conveniently left out "and committing genocide to a degree never seen before." How do you make people capable of that surrender? Japan was prepared to sacrifice millions of their own civilians by forcing them to essentially commit suicide in defense of Japan's empire. How do you make leaders willing to do that surrender?
Yes, it was war, and there are certain actions that are supposed to be off limits even when you're at war, called "war crimes."
What's even worse is that some of them are actually venerated TODAY! Like, fuck this world.
I'd argue that the US wouldn't drop a bomb in Europe for the same reason they chose to do so in Asia. From the decision makers POV, why would you annihilate good honest western civilization?
It would have probably been used in the Korean War as a show of force.
I see people say this a lot, but the Allies caused far more destruction in Germany than they did in Japan.
Do you think TWO bombs were necessary?
Because all the arguments I see only justify ONE bomb at most
You mean besides the fact that they did? I mean, Allied leader had few qualms about firebombing German cities, it just wasn't as effective.
You know those bombed out pictures and videos of Berlin in 1945? How do you think it became bombed out? Hint: It was already mostly like that when the Soviets got there.
Japan got off light in contrast to Germany. Dresden bombings were uh very very bad. Not to mention when the Soviets were rolling through, they were not exactly pleasant.
No, it isn't taught. Only that the bombs were dropped to end the war and ultimately less lives were lost than a full on invasion. There are also some racist concepts thrown around about how the Japanese would never surrender. I remember being told when I was younger they would have fought with every last man, woman, or child (doubt that was school though, probably a racist relative). There is also a misconception that the Japanese refused to surrender after the first bomb, necessitating the dropping of a second bomb. The impending Russian invasion was barely touched on, as was the Russians' efforts on the Eastern Front and in liberating the Jews from concentration camps.
As someone who wasnt there, you know, at risk of being sent to die on Japan, I dont think I have the right to give my opinion on this.
War is brutal, the uncertainty of death and the us vs them mentality is intense. These hindsight criticisms are super easy to make in comparison.
War is brutal, the uncertainty of death and the us vs them mentality is intense. These hindsight criticisms are super easy to make in comparison.
Most likely because the Soviet Union got a bomb on its own before tensions were high enough to "justify" dropping an US made bomb on the Soviet Union or a country allied to it.
FDR was ready to nuke Germany if a bomb were built in time.
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