the number of American deaths prevented by the two bombs would almost certainly not have exceeded 20,000 and would probably have been much lower, perhaps even zero,”
I like and respect Japan today. In some ways, I even respect it more than the US, at least when comparing the modern state of both nations. I think it's too bad that many Japanese civilians died, both in the atomic bombs and in the more conventional bombing campaigns. But, that is a war. One that Japan started. In a war, a leader's first duty is not to the civilians of the enemy nation, nor are those lives even equal to the lives of his own people. If the bombs saved even 20,000 American lives then, as the American president with a duty to protect Americans, Truman was right to drop them. As for the statement that it may have saved zero American lives, I assume that's predicated on the idea that Japan could have been brought to the negotiating table to end the war at essentially any moment if we hasn't demanded surrender terms that were quite so steep. That's an idea I've heard before, and I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's certainly not well developed in this article. In fact, it's a claim so drastic and also so unsupported that it makes me suspect the quality of the entire rest of the reasoning presented.
Indiana farmers from a 12 sibling family all living within 10 miles of each other. I'd spend summers there learning about how easy it is to maul yourself with farm equipment. Most of the men were missing at least a finger, some a hand. That's when I decided to be anything other than a farmer. That's a no shitter.
I had a number of relatives who were pretty much subsistence farmers from Arkansas join the Navy because they thought it was exciting and had never seen an ocean. They all served in the Pacific. Amazingly, they all made it back home. They didn't talk about it much but they did say the Japs were "pretty serious" when it came to a fight.
The claim of "perhaps even zero" makes mockery of everything, that line in itself is enough to deem the opinion of the author invalid and insipid.
There were already deaths. The battle was ongoing, WHILE THE PLANES WERE IN THE AIR. More deaths occurred between the bombs dropping and the surrender! That alone automatically makes their claim a lie. To claim that NOT stopping your enemy from murdering your people will magically prevent all deaths is insane.
And I guess the author was a big fan of the abductions and Raping of Nanking, huge fans of rape and kidnapping that author. Like, Japan was a cartoon villain in that war, because their morality was such a different perspective from ours.
Well, we did make them remake much of their governmental system and forcibly introduced some things that are probably a precursor to modern wokeness in certain ways. We established a military base that is still disproportionately responsible for rapes in Okinawa. But at the same time, once we get that far afield we're playing some big what-ifs. What if we hadn't made them make certain concessions, and then they rearmed, or allied to the USSR? What if we hadn't made them make certain concessions and then their economic recovery goes differently and they're actually worse off than they are today? What if reduced US presence makes the Korean War go worse? Or Vietnam? (Yes, that one already went pretty bad, but is there a different reality where Communism spreads to Thailand or Japan or elsewhere in the region)? So on and so forth.
Is there an ideal world where everything goes better than it did here? Yeah, almost certainly, but we don't really know what that world looks like or how it could have been reached, or how close to ideal we got. In general, I agree with you that the Japanese didn't get fucked over too badly or anything all things considered.
I was thinking the same thing about subtly conquering them, but that cultural exchange happens whether Japan wins or loses. The Japanese Empire overextended, and the US beat them only back to their original borders. And then figured out "we are more naturally friends" and switched sides in the eternal conflict with China.
The federal government was lousy with soviets during the war. That’s why FDR had such a hate hard on for Patton, and why they didn’t invade the soviet union.
We invented napalm. Specifically as a terrorizing tool to be used on the Japanese. Tokyo was a wood tinderbox, and we designed a weapon that would decimate that and inflict maximum human casualty while doing it. People would survive it; that was the point. That they would live in terror for the rest of their days of ever seeing something like that happen in front of them ever again.
We used it. They did not surrender.
This implied the necessity of an even more terrifying weapon. We used that. They did not immediately surrender, so we used it a second time. And only then, finally, did they admit they could not go on.
This is a dead simple analysis. I don't need 3000 words to explain it. It is what happened.
The fact that napalm was invented shows that the nukes were necessary.
No one in the US believed that we wouldn't have to expect less than 200,000 dead; not 20,000.
Operation Olympic included using nuclear weapons... on the battlefield.
The plan was that we'd have to drop nuclear weapons on entire Japanese army formations, and send the Marines in behind them. There is a reason we produced 400,000 Purple Heart medals for the initial invasion. Operation Olympic would have included round-the-clock fire-bombing of Japan. The assumption of all military planners was that the Japanese would have to be buried in, or burned out of, every cave in the entirety of Japan.
Operation Olympic would have been equal parts war, and equal parts genocide.
Now, in my estimation, it seems like the Japanese had actually waged a successful psy-op on Iwo Jima and Okinawa to make the Americans think this. Inevitably, the Japanese civilian draftees, conscripts, old men, children, and some women would have surrendered en mass, but not before the Americans had killed millions.
There were people who hoped that an invasion wouldn't have to be done, and that instead a blockade could have been done instead.
Let me be clear: a blockade would have been worse for Japan than the bombs. A blockade wasn't an economic sanction. A blockade was meant to starve the Japanese into surrender. This means that the Americans would have inflicted an intentional famine. See the horrors of a famine in: Ukraine, Greece, Crete, and China to understand the villainy of such an act of war. Sure, fewer Americans would have died (assuming the Japanese & Navy would have only tried a handful of major raids on blockading ships), but the atrocities on the Japanese people as they began to eat their own shoes would have taken quite a toll on anyone who claims the nukes were a better option. This, and the best American estimates are that the war would have dragged on into 1949.
That's assuming that the Soviets cared about a blockade. The Soviet Invasion was clear on how they would treat the Japanese: they would burn everything in front of them, and they would take no prisoners. The Soviets were glad to not take prisoners. If a blockade had been established, Japan would be a communist state, mostly populated by Russians, and most of the Japanese would have been fully exterminated.
There is no question. In a war filled with horror and brutality, the nuclear bomb was the only sane way to end the war without genocide.
That's because anti-nuclear sentiment in the west was always Soviet Propaganda.
Look into any non-western, anti-nuclear, political movements.
You won't find any that aren't explicitly funded by the Soviet Union.
This is because the Soviets were always secretly well below the Americans on strategic nuclear capability. If you prevent the Americans from building nukes in the first place, though...
I've dealt with a lot of Japanese media, including a shit ton involving the nukes in horrific terms. You know what never comes up when they discuss it?
That it was unnecessary. They will drone on about the power and evil of it, how truly fucked up it was and what it did to people. But never once will they pretend they don't get why it happened.
Because even they understand how fucked up their nation was during WW2, and public sentiment has gone from "woe is us, we are so broken" to "we were fucked up and broke ourselves in a lot of ways." But not once have I heard them cry victim about it being unwarranted.
I'm sure there is some talk of it, its completely valid to feel that way as it truly was a huge loss of innocent life. But its not an open and common sentiment.
They can claim it was bad, but they also basically didn't prosecute any of their war criminals, looked away when their war crimes were brought to their attention, and seem to always just look at it the war as if they had no agency at the time. Like it was some sort of natural disaster that just took place; because they really don't want to admit to the level of bullshit they believed in "We are liberating Asia from evil capitalist Imperialism, because it's not imperialism when we do it."; and the fact that because they believed in that shit, they didn't have a problem with what they did.
Considering that the militarists tried to stage a coup and assassinate the emperor even after having two nukes dropped on them; we know good and god damned well that the militarists would not have stopped. Hell, had they killed the emperor, they probably would have kept fighting.
We helped them cover their war crimes up because we did what we did with Nazi scientists for nukes with the people in charge of Unit 731 for chemical weapons. Declassified in the 90s, basically we intentionally fucked up the Tokyo version of the Nuremberg Trials so we could have the information.
To be honest, I already new about most of that. In fact, we actually had a treaty where we would just automatically forgive their war crimes as well as force them to forgive our war crimes.
My basic issue here is that the Japanese were never really forced to have an accounting of the shit they actually did. Now, the Americans like to gloss over it, but even with the smallest bit of digging, it's quickly apparent when the Americans were committing atrocities. In fact, atrocities were put front-and-center in both The Pacific and Band Of Brothers. Even Saving Private Ryan addressed US troops committing small war crimes. We shy away from it, but it's readily available. The Japanese never really wanted to have that kind of accountability, or even believe some of the shit they were responsible for.
Japanese culture tends to view the US in WW2 as an instrument of karma, rather than as a villain. Almost like we were a force of nature sent by the gods to humble them. So the nukes are more of a cosmic tragedy than a crime.
It was the cost of war. The Japanese understand this, its pervasive in a ton of their entertainment media. Would I want to see it happen? Of course not, particularly with me holding a level of respect for the Japanese people and culture. When you're in a war, you have to take care of your people first.
I hate the pussification of modern war, and that's why they end up being nothing beyond money laundering schemes for politicians now. You can no longer go fight to win or lose a war, because it would be unthinkable for just one child to be startled by a blast and fall and skin their knee.
Of course this guy has years of military experience. I wish it hadn’t been necessary but the war would’ve gone on for some years had they done a ground invasion
I don't have the book title I read years ago off hand (it was from a library, I never had my own copy), but the only valid point in the article is that after the first bomb the talk of surrender became more commonplace among the non military government members, but the military was still refusing to give up. The general populace, of course, believed we'd do what they did to us, and would have fought to the bitter end.
There's a few interesting bits on the kamikaze pilots, who sometimes were guilted into doing it (though some did it because they were batshit crazy).
Ultimately, the first bomb should be considered completely justified, the second I'm willing to have a discussion about with people, but to say neither was justified is frankly retarded and only makes sense if you hate the west and everyone in it (which is the typical leftist position).
The atom bombs promised the Japanese military leadership a death without honour. There would be no glorious last stand; they would surrender, or we would exterminate them like vermin. Even to a death cult that did not believe in mercy for the conquered, this was enough to shake their resolve.
The people who pretend that Japan didn't need or deserve to be nuked are at best useful idiots parroting an enemy propagandist. The claim is just another facet of the Marxists' attempts to pretend the Westerner has no culture, no achievements and no moral mandate.
Ya know, for how much "wasn't real Communism" the left likes using about the USSR, they seem awfully mad Japan surrendered to America and not the Soviets.
How is it that this place is full of holocaust deniers but not a peep about the possibility that Japanese atrocities in WW2 were also exaggerated or even fabricated by Chinese communists?
Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “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. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”
Adm. William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser, agreed with Eisenhower. “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” Leahy wrote. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
I'm just gonna be blunt here. A lot of midwits ITT are doing that obnoxious midwit thing where they assert their own armchair analysis as if it's established fact, when it's simply not. My guess is that when guys like Gen. Eisenhower and Adm. Leahy believed that dropping the nukes was unnecessary, the matter isn't nearly as settled as everyone is making it out to be.
And while the sanctimony of people (including the anti-war right, btw) who oppose the nukes may be grating, this tough guy posturing about how we totally for sure had no other choice is downright repugnant. Make the case that it was a necessary evil if that's what you think, but fuck all the way off with this smug, arrogant presumption that anyone who opposes the nukes is just morally simplistic or ignorant of history.
I like and respect Japan today. In some ways, I even respect it more than the US, at least when comparing the modern state of both nations. I think it's too bad that many Japanese civilians died, both in the atomic bombs and in the more conventional bombing campaigns. But, that is a war. One that Japan started. In a war, a leader's first duty is not to the civilians of the enemy nation, nor are those lives even equal to the lives of his own people. If the bombs saved even 20,000 American lives then, as the American president with a duty to protect Americans, Truman was right to drop them. As for the statement that it may have saved zero American lives, I assume that's predicated on the idea that Japan could have been brought to the negotiating table to end the war at essentially any moment if we hasn't demanded surrender terms that were quite so steep. That's an idea I've heard before, and I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's certainly not well developed in this article. In fact, it's a claim so drastic and also so unsupported that it makes me suspect the quality of the entire rest of the reasoning presented.
I had a bunch of relatives that were in the Pacific Theater who were very concerned about surviving the invasion of Japan.
They were white men, did they actually matter? /s
Indiana farmers from a 12 sibling family all living within 10 miles of each other. I'd spend summers there learning about how easy it is to maul yourself with farm equipment. Most of the men were missing at least a finger, some a hand. That's when I decided to be anything other than a farmer. That's a no shitter.
Edit: grammar.
I had a number of relatives who were pretty much subsistence farmers from Arkansas join the Navy because they thought it was exciting and had never seen an ocean. They all served in the Pacific. Amazingly, they all made it back home. They didn't talk about it much but they did say the Japs were "pretty serious" when it came to a fight.
The claim of "perhaps even zero" makes mockery of everything, that line in itself is enough to deem the opinion of the author invalid and insipid.
There were already deaths. The battle was ongoing, WHILE THE PLANES WERE IN THE AIR. More deaths occurred between the bombs dropping and the surrender! That alone automatically makes their claim a lie. To claim that NOT stopping your enemy from murdering your people will magically prevent all deaths is insane.
And I guess the author was a big fan of the abductions and Raping of Nanking, huge fans of rape and kidnapping that author. Like, Japan was a cartoon villain in that war, because their morality was such a different perspective from ours.
They were not too steep. Japanese still have most of Japan.
Well, we did make them remake much of their governmental system and forcibly introduced some things that are probably a precursor to modern wokeness in certain ways. We established a military base that is still disproportionately responsible for rapes in Okinawa. But at the same time, once we get that far afield we're playing some big what-ifs. What if we hadn't made them make certain concessions, and then they rearmed, or allied to the USSR? What if we hadn't made them make certain concessions and then their economic recovery goes differently and they're actually worse off than they are today? What if reduced US presence makes the Korean War go worse? Or Vietnam? (Yes, that one already went pretty bad, but is there a different reality where Communism spreads to Thailand or Japan or elsewhere in the region)? So on and so forth.
Is there an ideal world where everything goes better than it did here? Yeah, almost certainly, but we don't really know what that world looks like or how it could have been reached, or how close to ideal we got. In general, I agree with you that the Japanese didn't get fucked over too badly or anything all things considered.
I was thinking the same thing about subtly conquering them, but that cultural exchange happens whether Japan wins or loses. The Japanese Empire overextended, and the US beat them only back to their original borders. And then figured out "we are more naturally friends" and switched sides in the eternal conflict with China.
Not only were we right to nuke the Japanese, we were wrong to not nuke the Soviets.
The federal government was lousy with soviets during the war. That’s why FDR had such a hate hard on for Patton, and why they didn’t invade the soviet union.
We invented napalm. Specifically as a terrorizing tool to be used on the Japanese. Tokyo was a wood tinderbox, and we designed a weapon that would decimate that and inflict maximum human casualty while doing it. People would survive it; that was the point. That they would live in terror for the rest of their days of ever seeing something like that happen in front of them ever again.
We used it. They did not surrender.
This implied the necessity of an even more terrifying weapon. We used that. They did not immediately surrender, so we used it a second time. And only then, finally, did they admit they could not go on.
This is a dead simple analysis. I don't need 3000 words to explain it. It is what happened.
The fact that napalm was invented shows that the nukes were necessary.
This is comically stupid.
No one in the US believed that we wouldn't have to expect less than 200,000 dead; not 20,000.
Operation Olympic included using nuclear weapons... on the battlefield.
The plan was that we'd have to drop nuclear weapons on entire Japanese army formations, and send the Marines in behind them. There is a reason we produced 400,000 Purple Heart medals for the initial invasion. Operation Olympic would have included round-the-clock fire-bombing of Japan. The assumption of all military planners was that the Japanese would have to be buried in, or burned out of, every cave in the entirety of Japan.
Operation Olympic would have been equal parts war, and equal parts genocide.
Now, in my estimation, it seems like the Japanese had actually waged a successful psy-op on Iwo Jima and Okinawa to make the Americans think this. Inevitably, the Japanese civilian draftees, conscripts, old men, children, and some women would have surrendered en mass, but not before the Americans had killed millions.
There were people who hoped that an invasion wouldn't have to be done, and that instead a blockade could have been done instead.
Let me be clear: a blockade would have been worse for Japan than the bombs. A blockade wasn't an economic sanction. A blockade was meant to starve the Japanese into surrender. This means that the Americans would have inflicted an intentional famine. See the horrors of a famine in: Ukraine, Greece, Crete, and China to understand the villainy of such an act of war. Sure, fewer Americans would have died (assuming the Japanese & Navy would have only tried a handful of major raids on blockading ships), but the atrocities on the Japanese people as they began to eat their own shoes would have taken quite a toll on anyone who claims the nukes were a better option. This, and the best American estimates are that the war would have dragged on into 1949.
That's assuming that the Soviets cared about a blockade. The Soviet Invasion was clear on how they would treat the Japanese: they would burn everything in front of them, and they would take no prisoners. The Soviets were glad to not take prisoners. If a blockade had been established, Japan would be a communist state, mostly populated by Russians, and most of the Japanese would have been fully exterminated.
There is no question. In a war filled with horror and brutality, the nuclear bomb was the only sane way to end the war without genocide.
Yes the threat of the Soviet invasion isn't even included in the article.
That's because anti-nuclear sentiment in the west was always Soviet Propaganda.
Look into any non-western, anti-nuclear, political movements.
You won't find any that aren't explicitly funded by the Soviet Union.
This is because the Soviets were always secretly well below the Americans on strategic nuclear capability. If you prevent the Americans from building nukes in the first place, though...
I've dealt with a lot of Japanese media, including a shit ton involving the nukes in horrific terms. You know what never comes up when they discuss it?
That it was unnecessary. They will drone on about the power and evil of it, how truly fucked up it was and what it did to people. But never once will they pretend they don't get why it happened.
Because even they understand how fucked up their nation was during WW2, and public sentiment has gone from "woe is us, we are so broken" to "we were fucked up and broke ourselves in a lot of ways." But not once have I heard them cry victim about it being unwarranted.
I'm sure there is some talk of it, its completely valid to feel that way as it truly was a huge loss of innocent life. But its not an open and common sentiment.
They can claim it was bad, but they also basically didn't prosecute any of their war criminals, looked away when their war crimes were brought to their attention, and seem to always just look at it the war as if they had no agency at the time. Like it was some sort of natural disaster that just took place; because they really don't want to admit to the level of bullshit they believed in "We are liberating Asia from evil capitalist Imperialism, because it's not imperialism when we do it."; and the fact that because they believed in that shit, they didn't have a problem with what they did.
Considering that the militarists tried to stage a coup and assassinate the emperor even after having two nukes dropped on them; we know good and god damned well that the militarists would not have stopped. Hell, had they killed the emperor, they probably would have kept fighting.
We helped them cover their war crimes up because we did what we did with Nazi scientists for nukes with the people in charge of Unit 731 for chemical weapons. Declassified in the 90s, basically we intentionally fucked up the Tokyo version of the Nuremberg Trials so we could have the information.
https://youtu.be/eMq-fApmzts?si=xMACD5q0q-68aQIw
This actually covers the coverup which I genuinely didn’t know about until a month or so ago when I was on my history binge
To be honest, I already new about most of that. In fact, we actually had a treaty where we would just automatically forgive their war crimes as well as force them to forgive our war crimes.
My basic issue here is that the Japanese were never really forced to have an accounting of the shit they actually did. Now, the Americans like to gloss over it, but even with the smallest bit of digging, it's quickly apparent when the Americans were committing atrocities. In fact, atrocities were put front-and-center in both The Pacific and Band Of Brothers. Even Saving Private Ryan addressed US troops committing small war crimes. We shy away from it, but it's readily available. The Japanese never really wanted to have that kind of accountability, or even believe some of the shit they were responsible for.
Japanese culture tends to view the US in WW2 as an instrument of karma, rather than as a villain. Almost like we were a force of nature sent by the gods to humble them. So the nukes are more of a cosmic tragedy than a crime.
It was the cost of war. The Japanese understand this, its pervasive in a ton of their entertainment media. Would I want to see it happen? Of course not, particularly with me holding a level of respect for the Japanese people and culture. When you're in a war, you have to take care of your people first.
I hate the pussification of modern war, and that's why they end up being nothing beyond money laundering schemes for politicians now. You can no longer go fight to win or lose a war, because it would be unthinkable for just one child to be startled by a blast and fall and skin their knee.
Children are doing poorly in current wars. And people also criticize it. But you have to start at the first.. Children are suffering.
Of course this guy has years of military experience. I wish it hadn’t been necessary but the war would’ve gone on for some years had they done a ground invasion
I don't have the book title I read years ago off hand (it was from a library, I never had my own copy), but the only valid point in the article is that after the first bomb the talk of surrender became more commonplace among the non military government members, but the military was still refusing to give up. The general populace, of course, believed we'd do what they did to us, and would have fought to the bitter end.
There's a few interesting bits on the kamikaze pilots, who sometimes were guilted into doing it (though some did it because they were batshit crazy).
Ultimately, the first bomb should be considered completely justified, the second I'm willing to have a discussion about with people, but to say neither was justified is frankly retarded and only makes sense if you hate the west and everyone in it (which is the typical leftist position).
For anyone interested in books that are specifically about the Pacific theater, I can recommend Ian Toll's trilogy.
The atom bombs promised the Japanese military leadership a death without honour. There would be no glorious last stand; they would surrender, or we would exterminate them like vermin. Even to a death cult that did not believe in mercy for the conquered, this was enough to shake their resolve.
The people who pretend that Japan didn't need or deserve to be nuked are at best useful idiots parroting an enemy propagandist. The claim is just another facet of the Marxists' attempts to pretend the Westerner has no culture, no achievements and no moral mandate.
Should have dropped 3 to be honest. Japan still took way too long to surrender after the first two bombs were dropped.
Ya know, for how much "wasn't real Communism" the left likes using about the USSR, they seem awfully mad Japan surrendered to America and not the Soviets.
They still haven't used up the batch of Purple Heart medals they made in preparation for the expected casualties of invading Japan.
Korea, Vietnam, gulf war, Iraq invasion and Afghanistan combined resulted in less casualties than just that one battle was expected to cause.
How is it that this place is full of holocaust deniers but not a peep about the possibility that Japanese atrocities in WW2 were also exaggerated or even fabricated by Chinese communists?
Much better anti-nuke op-ed:
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/japan-was-already-defeated-the-case-against-the-nuclear-bomb-and-for-basic-morality/
I'm just gonna be blunt here. A lot of midwits ITT are doing that obnoxious midwit thing where they assert their own armchair analysis as if it's established fact, when it's simply not. My guess is that when guys like Gen. Eisenhower and Adm. Leahy believed that dropping the nukes was unnecessary, the matter isn't nearly as settled as everyone is making it out to be.
And while the sanctimony of people (including the anti-war right, btw) who oppose the nukes may be grating, this tough guy posturing about how we totally for sure had no other choice is downright repugnant. Make the case that it was a necessary evil if that's what you think, but fuck all the way off with this smug, arrogant presumption that anyone who opposes the nukes is just morally simplistic or ignorant of history.