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60 Years Since Hiroshima
cryptoz writes "Today is the 6th of August, 2005, exactly 60 years after the first nuclear device was used in a war. Japan remembers what happened, as do those around the world. Elswhere, we remember where the bomb hit, as well as how it worked." From the article about Japan's observation of the anniversary: "The anniversary comes as regional powers meet in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind rising calls in Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the United States. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was among those attending the ceremony in Hiroshima, 690 km (430 miles) southwest of Tokyo." We've previously reported on the anniversary of the first nuclear explosion.
I think its extremely important that we remember these events, to ensure that the situations and attitudes that led to them can be remembered and the contribution of people who died on both sides to bringing the world to the way it is today. We can't change the past, but we can try to avoid the same situations and circumstances. A generation now are being raised where full scale war between first world countries is a thing of the past, and its important that they can come to respect the happenings of the past.
Business Voyeur
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-71-1794/conflict_war/ hiroshima/
It's a sad day in the history of humanity. The cruelty that we visit upon each other should never be forgotten.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
They were young men hoping to help end World War II. But to their mission's critics, the crews that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan were part of a war crime.
Three men involved in the attack on Hiroshima shared with the BBC their memories of a day that has stayed with them for 60 years.
Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, 84
The day before the mission we sat through briefings on Tinian island where they told us who was assigned to which plane, and we ran through what we were going to do.
About 2pm we were told to get some sleep. But I don't know how they expected to tell us were we dropping the first atomic bomb on Japan and then expect us to sleep.
I didn't get a wink. Nor did most of the others. But at 10pm we had to get up again because we were flying at 2.45am.
They briefed us that the weather was good, but they were sending weather observation planes up so we would have the best information on targeting Hiroshima.
We had a final breakfast and then went down to the plane shortly after midnight.
There was a lot of picture-taking and interviewing going on - by the military - and it was a relief to get in the Enola Gay about an hour before we took off.
We flew in low over Iwo Jima while the bomb crew checked and armed Little Boy (the uranium bomb) and once we cleared the island we began climbing to our bombing altitude of just over 30,000 feet.
It was perfectly clear and I was just doing all the things I'd always done as a navigator - plotting our course, getting fixes to make sure we were on course and reading the drifts so we knew the wind speed.
As we flew over an inland sea I could make out the city of Hiroshima from miles away - my first thought was 'That's the target, now let's bomb the damn thing'.
But it was quiet in the sky. I'd flown 58 missions over Europe and Africa - and I said to one of the boys that if we'd sat in the sky for so long over there we'd have been blown out of the air.
Once we verified the target, I went in the back and just sat down. The next thing I felt was 94,000lbs of bomb leaving the aircraft - there was a huge surge and we immediately banked into a right hand turn and lost about 2,000 feet.
We'd been told that if we were eight miles away when the thing went off, we'd probably be ok - so we wanted to put as much distance as possible between us and the blast.
All of us - except the pilot - were wearing dark goggles, but we still saw a flash - a bit like a camera bulb going off in the plane.
There was a great jolt on the aircraft and we were thrown off the floor. Someone called out 'flak' but of course it was the shockwave from the bomb.
The tail-gunner later said he saw it coming towards us - a bit like the haze you see over a car park on a hot day, but moving forwards a great speed.
We turned to look back at Hiroshima and already there was a huge white cloud reaching up more than 42,000 feet. At the base you could see nothing but thick black dust and debris - it looked like a pot of hot oil down there.
We were pleased that the bomb had exploded as planned and later we got to talking about what it meant for the war.
We concluded that it would be over - that not even the most obstinate, uncaring leaders could refuse to surrender after this.
In the weeks afterwards, I actually flew back to Japan with some US scientists and some Japanese from their atomic programme.
We flew low over Hiroshima but could not land anywhere and eventually landed at Nagasaki.
We didn't hide the fact that we were American and many people turned their faces away from us. But where we stayed we were made very welcome and I think people were glad that the war had ended.
Morris "Dick" Jepson, 83
I was a young second lieutenant in the US Air Force and was designated as the weapons test officer on the Enola Gay.
Enola Gay returns after Hiroshima mission (photo: Smithsonian Institution)
For Dick Jepson, the Enola Gay flight was his first combat mission
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_pr eview.asp?idArticle=5894&R=C62A29C91
This is a wonderful article from the Weekly Standard concerning Truman's choice.
The most salient fact? About 10,000 people per day were dying per day in the Pacific theatre, mostly civilians in Japanese-occupied countries. Any alternative to the bombs that would have caused a one month delay would have wound up with more dead than the bombs themselves.
Remember this before you rattle off about some alternative scheme to end the war.
from wikipedia.
The Japanese also engaged in mass killings; millions of Asian civilians and Allied POWs were killed by its military and/or used as forced labour. The most notorious atrocities occurred in China, including the slaughter of almost half a million Chinese during the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731's experiments with biological warfare in Manchuria, with a view to killing a large part of the Chinese population. Japanese war crimes also included rape, pillage, murder, cannibalism and forcing female civilians to become sex slaves, known as "comfort women" .
Truman had another option to end the war -- Godzilla. Yes, Godzilla.
We could have avoided the whole nuclear arms race if we'd only sent it Godzilla. Or giant robots. Ok, the robots wouldn't have worked without a nuclear power source, but still think of it -- Godzilla or giant robots!
Only problem is finding enough butterscotch pudding to control Gozilla. It's his favorite, by the way.
1) more people died previously in (single) conventional bomb strikes (firebombings);
2) Japan had, at that point, lost control of air and sea (over and around) their nation;
3) Japan was starving it's people and urging them to prepare for "millions of honorable deaths";
4) The Emperor wanted to surrender, but the Japanese military leadership refused to allow it;
5) Japan was warned repeatedly by the USA that refusing to surrender would exact a terrible toll;
6) Japan was seriously dragging their heels, taking weeks to decide, preparing for a defensive land war.
Finally, the US ended the stalemate, without a gruesome land war.
No one in the USA wanted to fight an "Iwo Jima" style battle, one in which hundreds of lives were lost just gaining or losing a couple of yards.
Fought on their home islands, the Japanese would have fought terribly, to the last man woman or child, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost on each side to starvation or this hellish land war.
The bomb, in many ways, was a gift for both sides.
and can say without hesitation whatsoever that this anniversary is getting far less news coverage here, and isn't being talked about by the average Japanese. In general, Japanese are much less political than Americans. I could go into why but that would be a really long post. If you care, start by learning about honne and tatamae.
IIRC 300,000+ or so were lost in Japan's Rape of Nanking, addition to the hundreds of thousands that were literally raped.
Would you not prefer that a nuke had been dropped, and only 210k killed?
I am more ashamed of the horrible and needless fire bombings of Dresden. Germany was defeated; it was a senseless waste of human life, and a loss of hundreds of years of culture. I can justify the a-bomb, military and industrial targets were hit including the factory that made the torpedoes that hit Pearl Harbor, but Dresden was a city of no military or strategic importance. You can make the case that the a-bomb saved lives by avoiding an invasion of mainland Japan, but there is no justification for what happened in Dresden.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Here's a film from the Internet Archive:
...
A Tale of Two Cities" (1946)
There is be more
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
I already know that there's going to be people arguing back and forth that a) Hiroshima was a tragedy that never should have happened, or b) Hiroshima was necessary because it ended the war/punished the Japanese/etc.
Well, you know what? I don't care about either of those perspectives. Maybe it was necessary, maybe it wasn't, it's history now, and let's treat it as such. But there's one thing about the bomb that nobody in the US seems to realize:
Any country, *any* country, that uses nuclear weapons against another country had better let it weigh on their soul for as long as that country exists. The discussion should be constant, and permanent, and without end. The empathy of the pain that the Japanese people went through should be part and parcel of every conversation about World War II. People should go to sleep every night knowing exactly how serious of a decision that was.
And that's the problem: For every other country whose government's have committed mass murder, whether justifiable or not, there is a sense of history, of ownership of the bad as well as the good, there is a conceivability that they are as much responsible for the past as they are for the present and future.
In the US, we don't have that sense. It's all abstract and textbook, it's all justifications and wartime terminoligy. It's all disconnected and abstracted to the point of science fiction.
So argue all you want about whether it was right, or wrong, or good, or bad, or justifiable, or unjustifiable. To me, I can understand both sides of that debate.
What I can't understand is how most Americans seem to care much about what it means that we sent two Japenese cities into a nuclear hell. Using the bomb was a horrible act, whether or not it was justifiable, and the real tragedy is that the Japanese people were forced to understand that, while we read the headlines, added some notes to the next year's schoolbooks, and then continued on with our lives.
Utter propaganda developed by the United States for it's own benefit.
Take a look at the scholarly work on the subject. Japan was ready to surrender, they had offered conditional surrender before the bombs were dropped. Of course that was rejected, and no doubt should have been for strategic reasons.
US military officials agreed that Japan was close to surrender, and it's military capability was almost entirely destroyed in the fire-bombings that took place before Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The military dictatorship that influenced and basically forced the Emperor to support it and their ideals has already collapsed under the shame from their losses and failure to defend Japan. Take a look at the 1946 Bombing Survey for more info. Japan was not a significant military threat at the time. Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is a good starting point. Though if you think he's biased you can find the same referenced info elsewhere. Military officials were clear that Japan was not a great threat anymore. Marshall councilled against using the bomb on civilian populations, as did most other advisors and the creators of the weapons.
No evidence backs up the claim that anywhere from half a million, to a million US lives would be required to take Japan. No data at all supports that, indeed the numbers seem to be drawn out of thin air. There is no accurate measurement of how many lives would be needed to take Japan, especially as many suggest that Japan was close to surrender, had little military might, and might not even need to be invaded at all.
It is clear that Truman lied to the American people when he notified them on the bombing of Japan with nuclear weapons. "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Hiroshima was not a "military base". The aim of dropping the bomb was not to hasten Japanese defeat in order to spare US lives, but rather as a strategic move to check Stalin. Stalin was to declare war on Japan and join in any possible invasion. The US did not want to face another East/West Germany situation, with a possible unfriendly government in the region. Instead they wished to have influence in the region, and to show military might. Taking the first step in the Cold War meant that they had to make a show of power, and dropping the Bomb was that step. It showed the region, Stalin, and the world at large that they were in control. An impressive step was needed to assert this power, and indeed Truman no doubt felt that by asserting US authority and making a power play he could prevent the US from having to fight more wars in the future and scede power to unfriendly governments.
So your point is entirely falacious. Often repeated and held as truth in schools and blindly pro-US people, but there is no factual evidence to support it. Please take a look at all the scholarly work on the subject. It is so one-sided as to be ridiculous. Bombing Japan in order to save hundreds of thousands of US lives is a story without any merit at all.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
I always thought Nagasaki gets less attention than it deserves. You always hear about the Hiroshima anniversary, but rarely hear about the Nagasaki anniversary.
So let me remedy that with a link to the San Francisco Exploratorium's exhibition of restored photos taken shortly after the attack, Remembering Nagasaki.
I keep reading posts from proud Americans how the bombs were justified, saved x lives and the world should be thankful for the guardian angel that US is.
Yet no word on the point of view (that I assume was never taught in US schools) that the bombing was unnecessary, as Japan was about to surrender, the wheels were in motion but accidental/intentional communication problems prevented that from happening before the bombs were dropped.
I also cannot discount the point of view that US had used this opportunity to do a real-life test and show the world its new weapon technology, just like recently in Iraq with the bunker busters and stealth fighters, and to ensure its uncontended first page in the world superpower book.
No words on that fact that mostly CIVILIANS were killed in a horrible way in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
and feel fine about the stuff they should feel guilty over.
If truman had the atomic bomb and reasonably believed using this weapon would end the war and would save a million lives he had a DUTY to use it even if the civilian cost was terrible.
If the critics can play monday morning quarterback then so can I. The use of the atomic bomb in the real world as opposed to just tests allowed the world to see how horrible it was and so far has ensured only two have been used in the last 60 years.
If Americans want to feel guilty over something, feel guilty about your SUV's helping to fund terrorism through oil money. we should feel guilty that we have allowed our constitution to be gutted in the name of safety. We should feel guilty that we sent american soldiers over to die in iraq without demanding verifiable proof from their commander in chief for the reasons for going. Theres plenty of things we can feel guilty about without accepting undesserved blame
The Japanese were not our enemy. Japan was our enemy. My grandfather had a Japanese friend who left for home in 1940, a point when they knew that Japan and the US would almost certainly be fighting each other. He used to tell the tale of their parting, when his friend said, "I go to fight for my country. You go and fight for your country. And when it's all over, we shall meet and continue this friendship."
The detention of Japanese in the internment camps was inexcusable, but was not on the scale of what happened to the Jews. The Japanese were not routinely executed, had their fillings dug out after they were dead, vivisected, or forced to work in dangerous conditions. There were people of Japanese descent in the US armed forces.
The US did have an idea of what was happening to Japanese cities, though. I'm not sure that casualty figures were routinely announced, but it was well-known that extraordinary numbers of civilians were dying in the bombing of that nation. More than 100,000 died in the fire-bombing of Tokyo of 10 Mar 1945.
The overall difference is that the attacks on the Japanese people could be argued as military necessity; the attacks on Jews by Nazis had no military necessity, and in fact it can be strongly argued that they hurt military operations by diverting men and armaments from the front lines, and workers from the factories.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
"
The way we finished the war saved a lot more lives then would have been lost if we all kept fighting."
You're thinking like a propagandist, not a human being. There was no reason to incinerate an entire city of CIVILIANS, when there would have been military targets that could have served as an equally impressive example of the might that America wielded. The atrocities of the Japanese do not make those of America any less atrocious.
I have a feeling you'd cry foul if someone started rationalizing September 11th by saying, "America started it by occupying places in the Middle East, blah blah blah." So don't try to be a crime against humanity defender.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You need to read up on your history. Look at the number of Japanese soldiers who surrendered on every island that we took in the pacific. The numbers are very low. Many islands, with garrisons of 20,000 Japanese soldiers would often only surrender a dozen or so men. The Japanese were FANATICAL, and DID NOT SEE SURRENDERING as an option as long as there were standing soldiers. You live in the west. You have a much different view of death and honor than the imperial japanese army did. Its just like with American troubles in the middle east right now. Americans have a hard time understanding how a man can strap bombs to himself and blow himself up. Its because Muslims have a much different idea of what death means than the west does. And lets not forget, the Japanese committed horrible atrocities all throughout the Pacific and in China.
I'm basically convinced that we wanted to study the effects on real targets, and also implicitly threaten Stalin, and those factors were used to justify the targeting. We hated the Japanese enough to consider their use as human Guinnea pigs to be a trivial aspect.
Not sure how to file this aspect, though it's surely not amusing, but we might well have killed more Japanese and learned more about nuclear war by "humanely" hitting Mount Fuji first. A low-level blast planned to create the maximum visual scarring of Mount Fuji would have also kicked up an enormous amount of fallout, and the long-term fatalities would probably have been very high, though the immediate deaths would have been reduced. Of course, part of our ignorance at that time included ignorance of radiation sickness and fallout.
However, looking at the state of the world today, it doesn't seem like we learned much by it. At least nothing important.
By the way, I've lived in Japan for many years. On a clear day, I can see Mount Fuji from my train station.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
But how does it feel -after all pride and duty- to be part of the nation that fired up such a "baby" at first?
It feels a whole hell of a lot better than if Japan or Germany developed it first.
an ill wind that blows no good
Using them the first time is the hardest; it's easier to do it again.
I'd say you've got that backwards.
The first time, with the two explosions in Japan, was the easiest. It was only afterwards that using them became an unforgivable crime in the eyes of the world.
This is a wildly different situation for many reasons, not the least of which is that "arabs" do not compose a nation which declare war as a whole.
Your analogy might be apt if all of asia were has been engaged in guerilla war with the US, but in fact, the Japanese were busy slaughtering their neighboring asian nations at the same time they were fighting us.
Also, this ignores the factors of Israel and its dependence upon US assistance to defend itself, as well as the fact that Saddam invited the second most recent major war between the US and iraq by invading, his rich but relatively defenseless neighbor.
Because it wasn't, and such acts aren't. Killing people swiftly and suddenly doesn't make killing better or morally acceptable.
-- Not a
The rape of Nanking was only one incident, and was completely indicative of Japan's atrocities in Asia (China, Korea, SE Asia). See this:_ Atrocities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_War
The people of China and Korea (both of them) will never forgive the Japanese for what they did in World War II during their totally unjustified quest to create the "East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" i.e. the Japanese Empire.
It is quite interesting how the war is treated differently in regards to the treatment of Japan and Germany. When one talks about Germany during World War II, all he/she usually talks about is the Holocaust and other acts of Nazi brutality. Rarely is the plight of the German people mentioned. This in my opinion is totally justified. However, when one talks about the Japanese, a quite significant number will choose to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how terrible it was for the Japanese civilians. The story that the first poster put up may be touching, but if you listen to the stories of the many millions of Chinese and Koreans who were brutalized, this story seems trite and insignificant in comparison. In my opinion much more focus should be put on Japan's war atrocities, just like Germany's war atrocities are commonly focused upon.
As a Chinese native living in the USA, I am surprised daily as to how many people feel sympathy for the Japanese b/c they were nukes, because I can never bring myself to feel such sympathy. To sympathize with them, is to denigrate the millions of my countrymen who were brutally slaughtered.
The destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were likely caused by communication problems, nothing more. When approached with proposals for surrender, Japan's leadership replied with "mokusatsu" -- a typically Japanese response when confronted with an unappealing offer -- "I hear you, but I choose to say nothing". The purpose of this sort of communication is to respond to an offensive offer respectfully whilst saving face, and it usually elicits a better offer. Of course, Americans don't understand that sort of crap, so along came a typically American response -- really bad sunburn for tens of thousands of Japanese. Had these two countries appointed some better diplomats, perhaps it would never have happened. But who cares about diplomacy when you've already decided you are going to annihilate one another?
20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, I have always wondered what would have occurred had we never dropped the bombs. It would be hard for me to believe that the Japanese would ever have surrendered otherwise. At the time, it was seen as a fate worse than death (the "unendurable"), and they were teaching women and children in just about every prefecture to fight with bamboo spears. This seems like determination that could only be broken by a weapon so powerful, awe-inspiring, and magical as an atomic bomb would seem in 1945.
Move beyond the war with Japan's rather explosive resolution and you have more to speculate about that leads back to it. Without our demonstration of the power of atomic weapons in Asia, would the U.S. and Soviets really not have blown the shit out of each other during the cold war? It seems to me that deterrence only works when there has been a demonstration of the consequences of unchecked aggression. This may be reductio ad absurdum, but I did not start caring about my parking tickets until I got a boot [clamp] on my car. The atomic bomb's use brought the power of nuclear weapons out of the abstract, and I for one am very thankful for the success of nuclear weapons today. They have put an end to war between developed nations, leaving our leaders to their inane intrigues and bullying (at least it's not World War III).
This fact leads me to a paradox that I find interesting. Targeting non combatants with nuclear weapons was definitely the wrong thing to do. It is terrorism. But in this case, considering all that could have been, I feel that it was right to do the wrong thing, even if for the wrong reasons.
The Japs knew they well 'n truelly beat by Saipan (just read any of the Japanese War ministry papers that were released about 10 years ago), gez by then their war production wasn't even replacing loses by 15% or something, let alone matching war loses, or matching the allies. Even us Aussies alone were almost matching the Japanese in many aspects of war production by then (of course that excludes such things as capital ships 'n subs. Mind you by the last year of the war Japanese aircraft production was abysmal, while such aircraft as Beaufighters, Mustangs & Mosquitoes were being made in Oz). The Japanese only kept fighting because unconditional surrender was unacceptable (which is why unconditional surrender's so rare) as they saw it as a risk to their monarchy.
Actually, the Japs knew they were beat by Midway - they knew the realities of US industrial production (the fact that only 17% of America's war effort was directed at Japan, yet the Americans were more than matching them. These figures become even more spectacular when one realises that Germany was directing arguably 80+% of it's war effort against the Russians) meant they had to force the US to meet it's terms with 6 months of Pearl Harbour or the war was lost. A such Japan had no intention of ever invading Australia, India or the US - their plan was to run amoke, quickly inflicting a number of knockout blows, there-by forcing the allies to accept their terms for peace - recognise the Japanese conquests in China & accept Japanese puppet regimes in the Philipines, Indochina, Malaya & the East Indies. (Going by a doco I saw) by Midway they had given up on the allies accepting terms on the puppet states & just wanted the China conquests recognised, which was still quite rightly unacceptable to the allies. By Saipan their hoped for terms were that the allies would be willing to accept some sort of Japanese hegamony/sphere in Formosa, Manchuria & Korea. By the fall of Germany the Japanese only had 2 conditions left - the monarchy must remain & on paper the surrender must be referred to as a 'negotiated ceasefire' (the Japanese obsession with 'face' is obvious here).
From what I understand the whole 'unconditional surrender' thing started as a policy of faith by Roosevelt & Churchill to Stalin. It became policy in regards to the Nazi regime as an attempt to relieve Stalin's concern/worries/paranoia about the West unilaterally negotiating terms with Hitler. The unconditional surrender policy was only extended to include the Japanese to satisfy American voters, who would otherwise ask 'why are the Germans expected to surrender unconditionally & not the Japs when it was the Japs that attacked us'.
Now lets see what some of America's great war-time leaders thought:-
GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR
There is nothing wrong with feeling empathy for those whose lives were harmed by this, regardless if they were on the "good" or "bad" side. They were still human.
There are always many pointless deaths of good people on either side of a war.
Neither the sanctions nor the atomic bombings occured in a vacuum. Actions of a great many parties contributed to both situations.
Let me put it in perspective for you.
Japan not mentioning the medical experimentation it conducted on Chinese civilians as well as the number of Korean/Chinese women forced into sexual slavery is sort of like Germany forgetting the "incident" (official Japanese textbook phrasing) where 6 million Jews died.
Would we tolerate the latter? Of course not. Why do we tolerate the former then?
Btw, I've taken US History/US History AP in American high schools., and it has extensive coverage of the oppression that Native Americans suffered, from the time Columbus landed all the way to the Trail of Tears. Do you know how Japanese textbooks characterize the Rape of Nanking?
The Rape of Nanking is described as an "incident" where the Japanese Army met fierce resisitance in taking Nanking (this seems to gloss over the fact that all Chinese troops had withdrawn from the city, and many citizens were displaying Japanese flags from their windows to get in the good graces of the conquerers). This is NOT from the highly disputed minority textbook which doesn't mention it at ALL, but rather from the one which about 40% of Japanese High School students read. In a recent radio broadcst (~2 weeks ago) I heard on NPR, a visiting Japanese psychology professor recalled incidents where college freshmen asked him whether America won the war, or if Japan did.
Imagine the international condemnation of the Holocaust was referred to as an incident, and not covered beyond two sentences in the entire history book. The German people have dealt with their atrocities in WWII; Willi Brandt, a former German Chancellor, KNELT in front of the Jewish Holocaust memorial. When has the Emporer of Japan done the same for the Chinese and Korean people? Don't give me the crap about apologies already being made; what use is there for apologies when the mindset of an entire nation, as reflected through its' educational system, fails to appreciate the extreme pain and anguish it has caused just 50 years before?
Just to be clear, I'm not justifying the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities with what I said earlier. It is no less horrific, regardless of Japan's wartime activities. I just wish ensure that certain parts of Japan's wartime past don't get overshadowed.
And that's one of the major reasons the US chose to drop it's two atomic bombs on Japan. The US was convinced that the Japanese would not surrender, at least under any terms the US found acceptable. They were further convinced (probably correctly) that a full scale invasion of Japan was cause an extreme number of casualites on both sides.
The hope, thus, was to convince Japan that they had a new irresistable superweapon. Every effort was made to give the impression that the US possessed a vast aresenal of these bombs, and that they'd just keep dropping them on cities until Japan surrendered unconditonally.
It was such an unprecidented amount of force that it was just totally shocking. Sure, cities were leveled all the time, but it took thousands of bombers with many bombs each to do it, and that's somethign fighter planes could mount a defence against. But here ONE plane with ONE bomb effectively leveled a city. No one had ever seen any power like it, and had the US been telling the truth (in reality those two bombs were all they had at the time), there could be no defence.
Then, of course, there were the after effects which were unknown before that. People who had survived the bomb unscathed, so it seemed, began dying from mysterious problems, later revealed to be from the radiation that was released. So the bomb didn't just kill when it was dropped, it kept on killing even afterwards.
I personally think it is an event to be remembered because it's a demonstration of just how dangerous nuclear weapons are. Those bombs are tame compared to what we have today, and the destruction they unleashed is amazing.
The decision to nuke Hiroshima was appropriate given the circumstances of war. For anyone who seems so 'horrified' at this atrocity, recall that the Japan and Germany initiated the war. Recall that Japan and Germany created a war against humanity with INDUSTRIAL genocide.
Recall that Germany was furiously working on the nuke - if things had been differently, London and Moscow would have been targeted.
Recall that millions of civillians and millitary personel were killed as part of the axis war plans .
I would have been angry if the allied powers had a means to immediately end the war, even at great civillian loss, and chose not to use it for fear of later slashdot-weenies whinning about being "nice" during a war.
I've been to the countries occupied by Japan during the 30s and 40s, and the people to this day go out of their way to say "thanks" for the US millitary efforts sixty years ago. Phillipines, China, Indonesia, Australia...
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
of your post. Japanese are in general apolitical and the younger generation simply doesn't think about Hiroshima (or history in general, for that matter). I once asked one of my Japanese coworkers, a very bright guy, how much they studied WWII during school. His answer was three or four days. I had an entire class entitled "WWII", and probably spent six weeks covering the war (the rest was the cold war and Vietnam).
.3% of the people that died in WWII, yet probably half of the anecdotes that an average American reads. That provides a completely distorted perspective.
The problem I have with anecdotes is that one is almost never exposed to them in proportion. The bombs constitute about
The 21 kiloton test (equal to Fat Man, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the more powerfull of the two) that many have seen photos of (it was the one with US troops in slit trenches), was detonated at a range of 6 miles. All too many of these soldiers later died from this, which was a great tragedy. But it was from long-term effects. None were killed outright.
/. readers probably wouldn't be here (hard for an ancestor to spawn, if he's dead, after all) if it hadn't been done.
A detonation at 60 miles miles, or ten times that range, would have accomplished nothing. It would also have depleted a very small supply of fissionables, produced at enormous cost at Oak Ridge (uranium 235) and Hanford (plutonium).
Save the talk, ye who would say, "What, you're worrying about the cost, when so many lives were lost?" Yes, I am. The US didn't fire the first shot, no matter what YAN conspiracy nutjob (we didn't land on the moon, alien bodies at Area 51, the CIA blew up the Twin Towers, etc.). But we sure as *hell* fired the last shot. We paid a lot to do it, and it was worth it. It saved US lives. Quite a few
As soon as it happened, a very warlike people suddenly decided they were pacifists. MacArthur spent more US $ rebuilding Japan, because contrary to the worst fears of the Japanese, he thought it was the right thing to do. He was dead-on right. That was money well-spent as well. Humanitarian reasons aside, Japan is now a firm ally. They are certainly lined up behind any non-proliferation actions, unless that brutal bastard in N. Korea *forces* them to develop nuclear arms, because the US waffles on something.
They hurt us bad, we hurt them worse, we're all even, and they're our friends. Good friends. I wish it hadn't happened, but not so much as the guys who served at the time. Bet on that, ladies and gentlemen. Don't get all PC, and sobbing over the cruelty of something that happened 60 years ago, and wasn't our fault to begin with. Enjoy what we have--the current friendship of a great people.
At this point, the US and Japan should just go off and build a lunar colony or something together. That's what friends are for, at the nation-state level: to do remarkable things that could not be done alone.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
that it's way too cynical to justify the killing of 210K by saying that it prevented many more from being killed.
The tally of people killed isn't the entire story. Americans would much prefer that Japanese died than fellow Americans. And that is a good justification; after all, we were at war with a country that attacked us.
It really makes no sense to say that an American should value the life of a WWII-time Japanese person as much as the life of a WWII-time American.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
They were just barely hinting at a negotiated cease-fire with the Russians as the intermediates. In their mind ("they" being the people in power), keeping the "emperor system" meant keeping the military junta in power with the emperor as its figurehead, and as a sovereign state - not an occupied colony run by Emperor MacArthur.
In fact, they had specifically rejected the suggestion by their Russian ambassador concerning the sparing of the emperor.
You are right, however, that we probably would not have invaded. Instead, we would have bombed and blockaded. Of course, at 10,000 deaths per day, this would make the a-bombs look like a miracle.
It should be remembered that the dropping of the atomic bomb wasn't the first instance of atrocities against civilians. Firebombing and saturation bombing killed far more than the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
It's inevitable that someone will talk about how these bombings (along with Dresden) were basically wholesale slaughterings of civilians, by today's definitions tantamount to terrorism and thus (presumably) inherently evil. The other side will always bring up XYZ reasons why the bombings were absolutely necessary, usually saying that they saved more lives in the long run, etc.
Frankly, I think both sides are full of shit.
First, NOTHING was necessary. Even if Japan was never going to surrender, we did not have to invade Japan--by that point in the war, they certainly weren't going to invade us anytime soon. We could have precision-bombed (or whatever passed for precision bombing in 1945) their major factories, blockaded their harbors, and they wouldn't have been a threat to anyone anymore.
On the other hand, in a major conflict that will decide the fate of the world, "terrorism" in any conventional sense of the word is not inherently evil. If you cannot stand against the planes that bomb your cities and ships, targeting the civilians that are making the planes that bomb your cities and ships is perfectly reasonable. Additionally, causing "terror" in your enemy and thus compelling them to surrender is a valid and can SAVES LIVES ON BOTH SIDES.
In a nutshell, no we weren't saints when we vaporized and poisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians (and then invaded them and destroyed much of their culture.) But you don't win wars by being saint-like. In a more one-sided war (like Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan), it is the moral duty of the much superior force to be humane, but in the middle of WWII the victor was anything but assured.
Concepts like "rules of war" and "terrorism" are shams. There is no line in the sand you can draw, no action that is absolutely unjustified if we're talking about the fate of millions or billions of lives. That doesn't mean we're no better than the terrorists, or that there is no right or wrong. Far from it, it means that we simply need to hate and fight them for what they are--closed minded religious bigots whom cannot peacefully co-exist with other ideologies. That is all.
On September 11, they attacked our financial infrastructure and our military headquarters. Considering that they are by far the underdogs, this is (and I urge mods to wait and read and think before doing anything rash) a perfectly acceptable guerrilla tactic for a group so hopelessly out-gunned.
The TACTIC is valid; their REASONS are utter bullshit and that is why we should wipe them off the face of the Earth.
(To even come close to justifying that level of extreme violence, we'd need to do something insanely evil, not just stick up for Israel in the UN and maintain a military base in Saudi Arabia.)
I worry desperately when people say that killing civilians or causing terror is wrong 100% of the time, except for when we vaporize a few hundred thousand civilians but that's ok because of reasons XYZ. It's ok to admit that anything goes in war. Doing so does not legitimize your opponent in the least, because at the end of the day you are fighting for the rights and ideologies and ways of life that will live long after the dead are put in ground. You must always seek to justify your actions (or rather, you must always seek to act justly) , but no single action is inherently unjustifiable.
Just so you know, I happen to think that Hiroshima was justified, Nagasaki wasn't, Afghanistan was justified, and Iraq wasn't, but the point is the criteria you use, not the judgment itself. If you're not consistent in your criteria, don't be surprised when no one takes your own personal "axis of evil" seriously.
Anyway, sorry for the interruption, you may now resume dredging up every questionable action from the United States' and Japan's history.
From the minutes of the Target Committee Meeting of May 10-11, 1945:
Hiroshima was selected because of the depot, because of the industrial area (which included military manufacturing), and to see how the hills would reflect the explosion.
Truman specifically avoided targeting purely civilian locations, including an order that Tokyo and Kyoto not be on the list. He accepted that civilian losses would be there; his speech stated as much when he said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Nagasaki was the second target of its day, and was a significant military port.
There is no debate that Japan was not in fighting shape anymore. The Potsdam Declaration (which demanded the disarming of Japan, the dismantling of war industries, the occupation of the islands, renouncement of territorial claims outside of the home islands, institution of a new government, handing over war criminals, and the occupation of Japan until such time as the above conditions were met, under pain of "total destruction", and there would be no negotiations) admitted as much. But the first reaction to the Declaration by the Japanese was to not comment (specifically, "mokusatsu" which may have been misinterpreted as intentionally refusing comment).
Had Japan been considering a conditional surrender? If they had, I've not been able to find anything solid on it. The only terms that I've found commonly suggested centered around keeping the emperor, having no foreign occupiers, and trying their own war criminals. These weren't going to go over well with the exception of keeping the emperor, because there was a severe lack of trust of the Japanese to follow through on their own and not rearm. The emperor had seen enough by this point, and was re-asserting himself to demand the end of the war, but this wasn't coming around fast enough because he still didn't have enough power. After the first bombing, no surrender announcement was made, and even after Nagasaki was hit, it still took four days of internal bickering before the emperor could come out and announce the surrender.
As for the losses, an invasion force of some 650,000 was being prepared. Okinawa had involved some 300,000 Allied troops and took nearly 50,000 casualties, one of four of which were deaths. More than 110,000 Japanese were dead, making for about a 9:1 kill ratio. Had similar rations occurred in a mainland invasion, it would have involve more than 100,000 casualties with 27,000 dead on the US side alone, and a quarter-million dead Japanese. However, the closer to the home islands the fighting got, the more extreme the Japanese became in their defensive efforts, and it's likely that the fighting would have been even more fierce, with losses even higher, because cities would be bombed prior to troop arrival, and it wasn't hard to kill tens of thousands with one raid.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The big uranium and plutonium extraction plants were up and running by the end of WWII. Those plants were way overdesigned; over several decades, they produced the materials for about 20,000 bombs. Neither Groves nor Marshall expected to win the war with just two bombs. The plan was to use about thirteen just to "soften up" the landing zones for the invasion of Japan.
After the war, there was a short period during which the US didn't have any working A-bombs in inventory. The original ones were really prototypes, with no shelf life, no safeguards, and a need for an expert to tend and arm them. It took a while to develop a ruggedized, safe to handle "GI-proof" A-bomb.
Actually Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets.
From wikipedia, Hiroshima:
During the First Sino-Japanese War, Hiroshima emerged as a major supply and logistics base for the Japanese military, a role that it continued to play during World War II.
and for Nagasaki
On 9 August 1945, the primary target for the second atomic bomb attack was the nearby city of Kokura, but the bomber pilot found it to be covered in cloud. The industrial areas outside Nagasaki were the secondary target.
And don't forget, the civilian population were under orders from the Emperor (who was seen as a god) to not be taken captive and use whatever they could as a weapon. There was an example of this (I can't recall the battle atm) where the civilians on an island that the Allies just won from Japan all commited suicide or rushed the Allies ending up dead.
Fucking-A, baby.
u-s-a! u-s-a! u-s-a!
As a Chinese citizen living and educated in the USA, I completely understand the significance and the magnitude of the Holocaust. However, most people of the West do not share the same understanding of the suffering of the Chinese during World War II. Read the numbers here:_ War#Chinese_Casualties
I agree with you on most of your points, but I disagree that the Holocaust dwarfed the Japanese war atrocities. Simply by the numbers you can see that the number killed are similar. In addition, most of the Japanese massacres were orchestrated in an attempt to scare the Chinese into compliance with their policies (this succeeded somewhat, but certainly not as much as they would have liked). Obviously Westerners will think that the Holocaust was more important, but there is no need to denigrate the comparable suffering of the Chinese.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese
Oh, and before anyone says this, whatever the Communists purportedly did is not relevant in this discussion.
Speaking of entirely irrational racist flamebait... http://www.superdickery.com/propaganda/1.html
"Superman says: You can slap a Jap with War Bonds and Stamps!"
Its amazing the things you can justify using this eye for an eye shtick. It usually ends up with everyone being blinded.
The fact that the Japanese army and its militaristic leadership committed atrocities doesn't damn to hell every citizen of Japan. Most of them didn't really have anything to say about it, they didn't even get to vote on it. Even the people who did support everything the Japanese military did were for the most part propagandized and brain washed to the point they couldn't differentiate the rightness and wrongness. Anyone who did stand up against it most assuredly would have just got whacked.
Its about like me saying you should be held personally responsible because the Bush administration launched the war in Iraq and American soldiers tortured prisoners in Abu Graib. Well if you voted for him both before and after you are responsible but all of us who voted against him aren't.
I personally would prefer to not be incinerated or brought up on war crimes charges because a government and a military over which I have no control commits war crimes.
@de_machina
In Japan, more so than other countries, there is a big difference between the way you truly feel and the public face you put on (honne and tatamae).
Having "harmonious" relationships with those around you is very important, even when there is a deep-rooted problem that you are burying. Since discussing politics does not lend itself to harmony, it is not talked about much. If it is not talked about, it tends to be not thought about. Because of that, it isn't covered so much on the news - there sure isn't a Crossfire or Fox here. It is pretty much a one-party system anyway, with the same left-center group having been in power for ages. Hence, most Japanese are fairly apolitical.
ULTRA intercepts, especially those between Togo and the ambassador to Russia indicate, make it clear that unconditional surrender (even preserving the Imperial House) was not an option; the only option was a ceasefire that would have maintained the status quo, and thus completely unacceptable to the U.S.
The primary planning was to make further fighting so bloody that American politicians would want to negotiate a more generous ending.
KAI BIRD and MARTIN J. SHERWIN are coauthors of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," published earlier this year by Knopf.
August 5, 2005
SIXTY YEARS ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.
The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 just five days after the Nagasaki bombing Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.
This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.
But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."
Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" and many other historians have long argued it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.
The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.
These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.
Today, in the post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the truth about the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war over Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender..."
- Admiral William D. Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff
"Arnold's view was that it was unnecessary. He said he knew the Japanese wanted peace. There were political implications in the decision and Arnold did not feel it was the military's job to question it."
- Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker,
deputy to the commanding general of the U.S. Armed forces, Henry H. Arnold
"The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with end of the war at all."
- Major General Curtis E. Lemay, commander of the 21st Bomber Command
"The President in giving his approval for these attacks appeared to believe that many thousands of American troops would be killed in invading Japan, and in this he was entirely correct; but (I) felt...that the dilemma was an unnecessary one, for had we been willing to wait, the effective blockade would, in course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials."
- Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations
"I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to (Secretary of War Stimson) 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..."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
[Back to the Atomic Bomb Controversy Page]
The decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan was heavily criticized almost immediately. Through the years an increasing number of scholars, politicians, activists, members of the military and others have challenged President Truman's conduct in the matter. Among their primary arguments are:
1) President Truman did not use all the options available to him and thus condemned 200,000 innocent civilians to a needless death.
Revisionist historian Gar Alperovitz in his book "The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb" proposes that a "two-step" policy was under consideration by President Truman and his top advisors in the summer of 1945. The first step was to secure Soviet cooperation to attack Japan soon after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the surrender terms offered the Japanese should specifically spell out that the Emperor would be allowed to remain in power upon Japan's acceptance of the terms.
Alperovitz writes that the the Joint Intelligence Committee informed the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that "a Russian decision to join with U.S. and Britain in the war against Japan would have enormous force - and would dramatically alter the equation: 'The entry of the U.S.S.R. into the war would, together with the foregoing factors, convince most Japanese at once of the inevitability of complete defeat.' It went on (step two): 'If...the Japanese people, as well as their leaders, were persuaded both that absolute defeat was inevitable and that unconditional surrender did not imply national annihilation, surrender might follow very quickly.'"
Doug Long on his web site writes: "Historian and former Naval officer Martin Sherwin has summarized the situation, stating, 'The choice in the summer of 1945 was not between a conventional invasion or a nuclear war. It was a choice between various forms of diplomacy and warfare.'"
The challenging position clearly believes that the use of the atomic bombs was unnecessary because there was a military and political reality in the Pacific that would have brought about Japan's surrender without the tragedies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This contention is "fleshed out" as follows:
FYI, the "Rape of Nanking" is a term popularized by Iris Chiang, whose poorly researched and referenced book is really a mockery of historical journalism. Nasty stuff happened at Nanking, but lets not blow the Nanking Massacre (actually the Fourth Nanking Massacre - essentially every time the city had been conquered in its history, the defenders melted into the civilian population and the conquerors metted out revenge on the people for it).
First off, Chiang's reference to Japan as "complicit in the holocaust" is way off. As Rabbi and author Hillel Levine (and former visiting professor in China) wrote in "In Search of Sugihara", the Japanese Consul-General in Lithuania issued visas to over 6,000 Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Lt. Gen Higuchi Kiichiro supported the first conference of Jewish communities in the Far East in 1937, and later aided Jews who had fled to Manchuria (and is mentione in JNF's Golden Book). Col. Yasue Senko did similar. As a body, the Japanese government was unwilling to do anything to interfere with their ally, but had a stated opposition to participation ("Outline of Measures Toward Jewish Peoples", 1938).
Anyways, back to Nanking. The city fell on Dec. 13, 1937, to Japanese forces under the command of Gen. Matsui. In his diary, he wrote at the time that he ordered that anyone who looted or starting a fire, even accidentally, would be punished; he also sought to eradicate the "disdain" for the Chinese among many of his men, who had been fighting them for so long. In the same entry, he wrote "I could only feel sadness and responsibility today, which has been overwhelmingly piercing my heart. This is caused by the Army's misbehaviors after the fall of Nanking and failure to proceed with the autonomous government and other political plans."
He caused conflict with his division commanders when he propose that the memorial for the Japanese war dead also honor the Chinese war dead; they compromised by holding a separate service. After Matsui returned to Japan, he erected a statue of Kannon (the Goddess of Mercy) on Izuyama in 1940, to deify both the Japanese *and* Chinese soldiers.
His Buddhist confessor wrote, after Matsui's death, that ""I am ashamed of the Nanking Incident," said Matsui according to Hanayama.
The statue of Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, erected by Matsui.
"After the memorial service, I gathered up everybody and warned them with tears of anger. Both Prince Asaka and Lieutenant General Yanagawa were there. [I told them] we came all the way to stand on the majesty of the Emperor, but the dignity [of the Imperial Army] was lost at a stroke through the brutal acts of the soldiers. But then everyone laughed. To my displeasure, a certain division commander even uttered, 'of course.'" By all accounts, he was a true "unified asia" believer who saw the Chinese not as enemies, but as future allies and friends whom he wanted to unify against Western intrusion, but was unable to control his war-weary men when it mattered.
The photos in the book are just embarassing - at least the ones that have been traced to their sources. One of Chinese heads on the ground was traced to Sato Susumu, who purchased it in a photographer's studio in Huining, where it was labelled "Heads of Bandits Shot To Death in Tieling" (i.e., killed by Manchurian nationalist Zhang Xueliang's men). Another claims to be Japanese soldiers cutting someone's head with a hay cutter, yet the uniforms are clearly Chinese nationalist (Asahi Shinbun later posted a retraction after posting the picture as it was originally claimed). Another is a cropped image of bodies washing up on a beach downstream from clearly war-devastated area, leaving only the pile of bodies in frame. The photo "Comfort Women Being Rounded Up" is actually a picture from a 1937 edition of Asahi Graph, the
I wish people would stop comparing JÃnsi to God. He's good, but he's no JÃnsi.
Yes, I read the idiotic LAT editorial. As with most of what goes in that Paper it's factually wrong.
Japanese strategy since at least Midway and certainly Marianas was to inflict enough casualties on the US, so that it could keep most if not all of it's gains, including China, Manchuria, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. As the US island hopped ever closer, the battles got bloodier and resistance more suicidally fanatic. Tarawa, Tinian, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and worst of all Okinawa, all took a terrible toll.
Japanese strategy was to make any invasion of the home islands even bloodier than Okinawa. On Okinawa there were 50,000 Americans dead or wounded, including 22,000 KIA, 5,000 of them sailors. Over 300 ships were attacked by kamikazes operating from Japan, with more than 30 sunk. Two Aircraft carriers were so seriously damaged that they were no longer functional. Over 110,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, and only a paltry 5,000 surrendered, most of them wounded and delirious. An additional 100,000 Okinawan civilians died in the fighting. The fighting itself raged from March until June, 1945.
This is what Japanese war-planners hoped to inflict on Americans, to keep at least Manchuria, along with Southeast Asia. Note that fighting in the Philippines continued right up to the surrender.
Japan was beaten, there was no way it could eke out a victory, it's air defenses were shattered, it's Navy no longer in existence, much of it's Army in China, and massive 1,000 plane air-raids by Curtis LeMay such as the March 1945 Tokyo firebombing had killed over 100,000 people. Fighting after March 1945 was no longer rational but it continued any way in the hope that "enough" US casualties would cause the US to simply back away and leave Japan with it's war gains and keep the militarists in power.
In response to this the War Dept presented Truman with three plans:
*The Navy's plan, continue a total blockade of the Home Islands, with continued fighting in Philippines, China, Manchuria, Southeast Asia, until at least 1947. It was accepted that all 25,000 or so Allied POWs would perish in this starvation strategy and that US casualties would mount into the 200,000 range as major operations continued in the Philippines and action in China was contemplated.
Truman rejected this plan.
*The Army Air Force's plan, under LeMay, was to gather all the B-17 and B-24 bombers from the European Theatre and conduct not 1,000 plane raids but massive 10,000 Plane Raids all over Japan. LeMay believed he would kill on the order of a million to two million Japanese in the inevitable area bombing of Japan's largely dispersed cottage war industries (with conventional bombs) and thus force a surrender. The War however could have continued for another year well into 1946. With again, fighting and dying in other fronts.
Truman rejected this plan.
*The Army had a plan which called for the invasions of Kyushu and Honshu (Olympic and Coronet respectively), the Japanese had clearly anticipated these invasion sites and had a one-to-one match with invading forces prepared with dug in Imperial troops in fortified defenses that had killed so many in Okinawa and Iwo Jima (3-1 advantage for the invader was the measure of invasion success in that time). In addition an astounding 10,000 kamikazes were readied, and the entire civilian population mobilized to fight the invaders (MacArthur simply ignored the "Magic" radio intercept evidence that the Japanese prepared for the invasion, the Navy was on the verge of withdrawing support for the plan as a consequence).
Truman had tentatively endorsed this plan, which projected 100,000 to 200,000 dead, subject to unanimous War Dept approval which was collapsing with Admiral King on the verge of bailing on the plan from the codename "Magic" radio intercepts. Far from being pulled out of the air as the LAT lamely asserts, War Dept planners based this on OKINAWA and if anything they were conservative. Area bombing of Le Havre on the day after D-Day k
Hiroshima had industrial targets, this much is true. It was not however, a "military base". Pretty much any city in a wartime nation has some targets of military value, that does not make the city itself a military base. Would you call Chicago a military base in and of itself? Would you call an attack or a bombing of Chicago to be an attack against a military base?
"Truman specifically avoided targeting purely civilian locations, including an order that Tokyo and Kyoto not be on the list."
Tokyo was pretty much decimated because of the fire-bombings. If it had not been for that it too would not have been "purely civilian". I don't know how much more of a pure civilian target you can get than dropping a nuclear warhead in the center of a large populated city consisting mostly of civilians.
Let's take a look at more of the radio adress by Truman.
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost."
This seems almost to suggest that the attack on Hiroshima was almost purely against a military target, and "thousands" of lives hadn't already been lost. Certainly seems to downplay the attack in my view.
"Nagasaki was the second target of its day, and was a significant military port."
Why not just attack the military targets in these two cities? Nuclear bombing was for the purpose of destroying the military targets? It most certainly was not military targets that the bombs were needed for. It was an attack on civilian populations, (and if the officially stated reasons are the only ones), an attack to frighten and terrorize the Japanese into submission through it's sheer devestation to entire cities, not as an attack on valid military targets to stop the military.
"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare."
So those who do not follow the rules of war, need to have nuclear weapons dropped on their civilians? That is part of the justification? Surely "intentional" killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, for any reason, is against what anyone would consider the rules of war. But it is justified because the other side did bad things? If we care so much about the rules of war, and treating soldiers, as well as civilians decently, we would not have to stoop to such tactics.
"Had Japan been considering a conditional surrender?"
Secretary Togo was talking to the USSR, the only major nation they were still at peace with, in order to act as an intermediary with the USA. The US, having cracked the Japanese codes, was aware of this and learned of it prior to Potsdam. Efforts were being made by the new civilian government of Japan, (Tojo and the power structure had resigned in shame), to end the war and negotiate a settlement with the USA, and to ensure the survival of the Emperor, which was the paramount concern. Negotiations were certainly being considered throughout the entire war. The plan of Japan's attack on the USA was to destroy the Pacific fleet in order to entirely eliminate the US presence in the region, thereby allowing the Japanese to take the Dutch East Indies, and the oil and rubber resources in the region, which they were in need of for their aggression in the rest of the Pacific Theater. After eliminating the US pacific fleet, they would then sue for peace with the US in order to avoid having to go to war with them on a massive scale, which they knew they could not win. This is very well established as being their strategy, and not just among cracy hippie professors.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
Actually it did. The only thing holding back the American and Russian generals and politicians from going at each other was the nuclear carnage. Plenty of classified discussions from both sides have been released to support this thesis.
Second, this is again, limited hindsight. Japan was asked to surrender after the first bomb and they refused under the belief that it was very unlikely the Americans had a second bomb. If Japan had surrendered after the first one, there would not have been a Nagasaki. By dropping the second bomb so closely after the refusal to surrender the USA signaled "there is plenty more from where this one comes from". By the way, an American physicist on his own accord dropped a letter with the first bomb saying so, and urging them to surrender. This letter made it up the chain of command in Japan and had no effect.
It is easy to condemn the bomb drop without all the facts at hand. Look at all the information that was missing from your judgment (a) letter attached to the bomb (b) in which way it was dropped so that it would survive the explosion and (c) be found by the Japanese after the blast (d) that it was addressed to a distinguished Japanese scientist who was a friend of the American scientist so that he could vouch for the credibility of its contents (e) that another Japanese physicist independently informed the Japan war cabinet that it was unlikely the US would have enough material for more than one bomb (f) that based on this Japan decided to continue fighting (g) that as soon as the second bomb was dropped the Japanese surrendered (h) that the US already had a third bomb on the way to the Pacific theater.
Dropping the bomb was a horrific act. The alternative (not dropping it, millions death upon invasion of the mainland) was equally horrific. Truman faced a veritable Sophie's Choice and either choice would haunt him forever. (Sophie was forced by the Nazis to choose which one of her two children would survive.)
You've been watching to much DOD footage. They showed that to you precisely so you would think they had cleaned up war.
"The whole point of developing smart bombs is to try to minimize civilian casualties"
Smart bombs were developed because they allow you to take out targets like bridges and bunkers with fewer aircraft placed at risk and a higher probability of success. Bombing bridges with dumb bombs was nearly impossible. Reduction in civilian causalties was at best a pleasant side effect but had nothing to do with the rationale for developing them. Stop kidding yourself and trying to kid me. The U.S. still uses B-52's to carpet bomb when it suits them.
Smart weapons probably wouldn't have changed the dynamic behind fire bombing Japanese cities. The objective was to totally destroy the cities and kill all the civilians in them in an attempt to break the enemies will.
"Now imagine if that bomb had been a nuke, or a tac nuke."
Wont have to much longer. The Bush is doing their best to start development, deployment and use of a new generation of tactical nukes. They wont be used on bridges probably but will be on bunkers and cave complexes unless someone stops them. If their is a bunker in the middle of a city they want to take out bad enough, you will almost certainly see detonation of tactical nukes in cities in the future, by the U.S. In Iraq they blew up underground bunkers on vague suspicion Saddam was in them, he wasn't and they mostly just killed civilians in the apartments and houses over where they thought he was. Imagine when they use tacitcal nukes for this role in the future.
"Civilian casualties are not something Americans like. It's political suicide for politicians -- hence the focus on smart bombs."
There was still an abundance of civilian casualties during the invasion of Iraq. Yes they are a political problem. The U.S. solved this problem by preventing any counting of them or anyone showing any video of them. One of Al Jazeera's main offenses during the invasion, for which their headquarters was bombed, and journalists killed was they showed uncensored video of some of the dead women and children.
I could make an argument that smart bombs made things more dangerous not less. They've kidded the upper end of the command chain, and the American public, that they can fight clean, surgical wars with impunity. The end result is a much higher willingness to wage wars. Even with smart weapons they are still brutal, ugly affairs and civilians still get killed. GI'S still panic and hose down cars because full of women and children because they are jumpy about car bombs, or tanks still flatten houses in places like Fallujah. Those are old fashioned ways to kill civilians, no smart weapons in sight.
@de_machina
> While I'm sure there were alternative means by which the final defeat of
> the Empire of Japan could have been brought about
Oh, yeah, sure. Eventually. Bear in mind, before the A-bombs were dropped, the US had already turned things around and was gaining ground continually. The US was winning -- gradually. But it was taking a long time. In other words, the atomic bomb did not change the *outcome* of the war (in the broad overall big-picture sense of outcome); what it changed primarily was the *duration* of the war.
Frankly, the US would have won even if Japan had the atomic bomb and the US did not; the outcome was determined by other factors, mainly infrastructure and production capacity and logistical issues. Before the atomic bomb was dropped, the US had already flown a plane over the Japanese capital city of Tokyo on at least one occasion. Japan could not put a plane over or anywhere near Washington D.C. at any time during the war, because there was an entire and rather sizeable continent in the way, controlled substantially by the US (and its allies, e.g., Canada would not have likely allowed a Japanese plane through their airspace either, even assuming a plane existed in that era that could fly that far without landing, which I think was not the case). Japan couldn't put planes over *most* US cities, not even if they could park an aircraft carrier in San Francisco harbor. They couldn't go through Panama, because the US controlled it (and anyway, it would be an unacceptably narrow chokepoint); they didn't have the submarines to go under the north polar cap (nobody did at the time), and Cape Horn (let alone going west and clear around) is so far out of the way as to create very severe supply-line problems. (Also, the British controlled the Falklands and might have had something to say about Japanese ships coming into the Atlantic that way; the allies also controlled the Suez, which leaves the route round the south of Africa, the longest route of all, completely untenable from a supply-line perspective. In short, Japan couldn't put ships in the Atlantic.)
But more than just geography, production capacity and infrastructure were in the way. After Pearl Harbor, Japan had a larger navy than the US. By the time the bomb was dropped, the US had a larger navy than Japan had had at any time during the war. How did that happen? Simple: the US could *build* a navy much faster; the US had more shipyards, more steel mills -- in short, more infrastructure. The US also had more domestic transportation and communications infrastructure, more munitions factories, more weapons factories, more *other* factories that could be converted if necessary, and more ecconomic resources (just compare the GDP of the two countries at that point in history). And if new technology was going to be developed that would impact the outcome, the US also had more universities and more research labs and every other relevant thing. And it isn't just that the US had more of those things because it was bigger; it *was* bigger, but also it was a first-world country, and Japan at the time was not; the US had much more infrastructure per capita, in addition to being rather larger.
Basically, Japan was seriously outclassed in this war. If Japan hadn't brought the US into the war by attacking first, it wouldn't have been anywhere near fair for the US to fight them (but fair sort of goes out the window when somebody attacks you).
Whether the US would have entered the war if Pearl Harbor had not been attacked is an interesting discussion, but even if they had, it is likely that Germany would have been the main focus, and Japan may have been left more-or-less alone. The Japanese leadership miscalculated this rather badly, because they did not have a good understanding of American culture and psychology, thus leading them to conclude, quite erroneously, that attacking would be a good way to keep the US out of the war, or reduce the US to a non-factor in the war's outcome. That didn't work out _quite_
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"Second, this is again, limited hindsight. Japan was asked to surrender after the first bomb and they refused under the belief that it was very unlikely the Americans had a second bomb."
Wow, that's a nice fairy tale. They were ready to surrender before the bomb, they just wanted to negotiate.
"It is easy to condemn the bomb drop without all the facts at hand. "
Apparently it's also easy to approve of it without all the facts too.
evil is as evil does
It appears as though "Scholarly work" is limited to that which you have read and agree with. Nothing in your assertions suggest that you are well read on the Pacific theater in the Second World War. I would cite the works of the Pulitzer winning biography by Herbert P. Bix on the Emperor Hirohito in which he specifically listed three failed opportunities by the Japanese to seek an end to the war prior to the decision to use the atomic bomb. I would also suggest that you read "Downfall" by Richard B. Frank concerning the final six months of the war in the Pacific in order to review not only the anticipated casualties in the event of the necessity for an invasion of the Japanese islands. I would finally suggest that you read "The Hiroshima Cult" by Robert P Newman in which he eviscerates Gar Alperovitz's silly revisionist opinions. I have found over the years that those who criticize the decision have read only material which seems to support their opinion, ignoring more recent works which use much more current information made available from relaxation due to freedom of information act, as well as additional declassification of government records and documents.