Posted on 05/04/2018 9:37:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In the decades immediately following World War II, American public opinion generally supported President Truman's historic decision to unleash nuclear weapons on Japan. Everyone accepted that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an unfortunate necessity brought on by the unwillingness of Japan to surrender. Those two bombs, which killed over 140,000 civilians, were viewed as a way to avoid the obscene costs in men and materiel associated with invading the Japanese homeland.
Nowadays, many question whether those bombs were necessary. Given that they killed almost exclusively civilians and that the second of the two was dropped only two days after the first, many people have concluded that the attack was immoral. Today, the typical American is likely to react to the words "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" with a vague sense that our country did something wrong.
But the nuking of Japan was a moral act: war is hell for those who do the actual fighting, so those two bombs put an end to their suffering. This was true for the soldiers on both sides (even a Japanese soldier must have felt relieved to know he was going to survive unscathed). A purely theoretical model for explaining why dropping nukes was bad appeals only to those who have no skin in the game.
The Japanese war had already killed millions, most of whom were civilians. The two nukes killed 140,000. Do the math. It is a distasteful application of arithmetic, but it is an application that soldiers have to do all the time in their struggle to win a war.
For those who favor elegant ideas over ugly realism, I strongly recommend as a corrective the work of an ordinary Marine who, in 1981, published a book narrating his experience as a hand-to-hand combat soldier in the Pacific theater
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The Left is upset because their beloved Soviet Union didn’t get the spoils and occupied at least half of Japan, like they did Germany.
And there’s no question that Japan would have been divided, just like Korea, with the result another Civil War that would have likely gotten even more Japanese and Americans killed down the road.
There was an attempt to kidnap the emperor in order to continue the war.
Very true, or even kill the Emperor and claim that he was a martyr.
I recently read a history of Japan. It included just a bit about MacArthur.
The Russian Ambassador, a general told MacArthur that the Russians were going to occupy Hokkaido. MacArthur informed him that if a single Russian soldier entered Japan, he would have the ambassador immediately shot.
There are variations in the language from north to south and suburban/rural...
I knew the emperor had made a recording to be broadcast to the people and that some officers were determined to steal the recording and isolate the emperor in the palace.
They didn’t get very far.
From what I understand during the war the emperor was merely a figurehead and the army generals made most decisions in his name.
The minister who called for the emperor’s opinion would no doubt have been executed by the military if the emperor had sided with the military.
Gutsy move by one guy.
I saw film of dozens of working jets and munitions stored in a mountain, not a single prototype - they were to be launched from within the cave they were stored in - landing again was optional.
. . . as it turned out, most of the Christians in Japan were in Hiroshima IIRC.
The U-boat captain took a week to surrender to a US ship. His orders were to surrender to the nearest Allied warship, but that was a Canadian ship only a few hours away. He had relatives in the USA and didn’t want to give up his cargo to Canada or England so he played hide-and-seek until he could find an American ship. Just think, if he’d followed orders, Canada would be a nuclear power.
“... it is instructive to look at a map of where Nagasaki and Hiroshima are located. Both are at the very south of Honshu... as far away from the main population centers as they could be ...” [imardmd1, post 8]
There are no cities far from others in Japan, and there weren’t in 1945 either.
The 509CG crews had orders to deliver the atomic bombs by visual aiming only; on the strike mission of 9 August 1945 their primary target of Kokura was obscured by clouds. They flew on to Nagasaki, where they found more clouds; the bombardier managed a quick peek through the visual sighting system and dropped the weapon. Bockscar barely made it back to an Allied-held airfield on Okinawa: fuel trapped in an auxiliary tank curtailed their endurance.
The master targeting plan for B-29 strikes on Home Island cities was carefully arranged to spare some urban areas, but planners weren’t told why. The reason was to keep some targets undamaged, to test the limits of the destructive capacity of any weapon that the Manhattan Project might come up with.
“...[Gen MacArthur] replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb...” [edwinland, post 69]
” ‘To exempt civilians from involvement in an existential war is to contend that the life of a child or a woman or frail elder is more vital ...’ [Original article by Spike Hampson, paragraph 9]
Possibly the most glaringly amoral sentence I’ve ever seen in an article posted on Free Republic.” [edwinland, post 75]
edwinland and those of like mind have it upside down: first, win the war. Then worry about morality.
Can’t speak for other posters, but I find assertions like the one edwinland made in post 75 to be odious. Second-guessing the decisions of those actually fighting the war, from a comfortable chair in front of a computer screen, three generations after the fact, secure and well-fed, toying with alternatives in a leisurely manner, casting painless moral pronouncements this way and that, smacks of hubris so towering it defies measurement.
Douglas MacAruthur was annoyed because no one saw fit to read him in on the Manhattan Project. His picque - understandable in someone with an ego that big - differed little from that voiced at the time by a number of senior leaders in the Army Ground Forces and the US navy: plain old interservice rivalry.
We might like to think that the armed services set such squabbles aside to fight World War Two, but they did not. And still don’t.
“I have heard the “blockade” reasoning before and who knows if that was workable while leading to a humanitarian crisis and most POW’s killed. ...” [shanover, post 67]
Maritime blockades do work, but they take a long time and can be quite cruel in the application.
Japan’s Home Islands were pretty much cut off from overseas areas by mid 1945, thanks to the boldness of USN submarine crews. Famine loomed.
Much Home Island local traffic moved by coastal shipping. Submarines could not effectively interfere - waters were too shallow. B-29s were loaded with aerial mines, which they dropped into coastal waterways. Local traffic was reduced 80-90 percent in a couple months, and total merchant vessel tonnage lost climbed another 6 to 11 percent (if memory serves). More accurate figures can be found in the US Strategic Bombing Survey.
“thank God for the Bomb” was not the whole story. The B-29 force played another role: POW relief. Surrender did not quell Japanese vindictiveness. Their hierarchy simply stopped feeding POWs in the camps in Korea and China. No other Allied system had the range, payload, and speed to get food to the camps in time. So the B-29s were loaded up with rations, which they air-dropped on the camps.
“...Germany started the war, so I have little sympathy for their position on Dresden.”
The fuss about Allied air strikes on Dresden in February 1945 was Nazi propaganda.
Dresden was a transport nexus; the Western Allies feared German forces would retreat to mountain hideouts south of there - from which they could stage guerrilla raids and drag out the conflict. Striking the city stopped that.
Additionally, there were a number of very small but very vital industrial activities going on in Dresden, important to Nazi weapons production: optics and other precision machines used in weapon sights, and electronics (if memory serves).
Limits to the fineness of Allied air reconnaissance precluded identification of individual shops and assembly plants; precision strikes could not be mounted. So RAF Bomber Command firebombed the town and 8AF hit it with demolition bombs. End of production.
It's just that simple.
Six hundred miles from Nagasaki to Tokyo. That soungs like a pretty fair distance to me. There is nothing further southwest than the ocean. Five hundred from Hiroshima to Tokyo. But maybe you didn't look at the map as was suggested.
Just stating facts. Not looking for an argument. I had to fly from Narita to Kagoshima on business, a 747 was used to handle the crowd of passengers.
“...General Douglas MacArthur said yes, they would have surrendered two weeks earlier ... Whether you take MacArthur’s view as persuasive or whether you think the Democrats in Washington understood the Japanese military establishment better than he did is up to you. ...”
Douglas MacArthur was talented, but he was at the end of the day a man of the 19th century, and made it a point of pride to voice his moral qualms. Plenty of military men did that. Many were truly shocked by the scale of Allied air strikes. They needed to come out of the horse-and- buggy age; 73 years later, it’s difficult to appreciate how hidebound, self-satisfied, and backward-looking they were. And they deemed it proof of their superiority, over upstarts like the airpower advocates.
Several senior USAAF leaders asserted (after VJ Day) that Imperial Japan would have surrendered, without The Bomb and before the invasion (set to begin 1 November 1945) - because of the firebombing campaign, which started early in 1945 and had done major damage to over 60 urban areas by August.
The senior US armed services never got over their upset with USAAF, which came out of nowhere in the blink of an eye (the way they reckoned time) and won the war for them - denied them the chance to lead stupendous fleets and forces into battle, garnering huge helpings of glory. It still rankles today.
No one foresaw the moralistic misgivings that surfaced after WW2. The anti-military, anti-nuclear activism wasn’t an intellectually genuine, sincere response to the ugly events of the war by a morally “woke” citizenry. It was a creation of the scientists, of academics, of the clergy: the intellectual elite, our self-appointed moral arbiters who were miffed that the technologists and the dreary old military had created such a potent weapon, in The Bomb.
They decided the American public needed re-educating, and set about doing so. Today, they’ve largely succeeded: great big sections of the military establishment are solidly against nuclear weapons.
Doesn’t make them morally right, nor does it hint that they’ve reached any understanding of history aside from the most superficial.
“Six hundred miles from Nagasaki to Tokyo. ... a pretty fair distance ... Five hundred from Hiroshima to Tokyo. ... maybe you didn’t look at the map ...”
imardmd1 is correct. I looked at a chart. They are more accurate - inside the prime parallels at any rate. Maps are drawn after the charts get published.
I offer apologies for lack of clarity: the distances between the named cities are correct, but there are a great many other urban areas in between. Japan was a crowded country then (still is).
509CG targets weren’t chosen for their remoteness.
And I’m betting imardmd1 doesn’t know a whole lot about how air strikes were planned then, nor executed, nor assessed. He’d not have bothered to post such a comment otherwise.
Thank you for reading the minds of those doing the planning. The next time I want your opinion, I'll ask for it. I have mine, and having traveled around in Japan on business, I've somehow gotten the idea that the places we A-bombed were about as far as you can get from the Emperor's palace. Drove by it, actually, a few times. Stayed in the Okura. It might have been a bit of a diplomatic faux pas to have destroyed it, then expected the sons of Nippon to abandon the "Tennozan" theme and humbly back down.
The issue was not a military objective, was it?
Wakari masu ka?
“Thank you for reading the minds of those doing the planning. The next time I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it ... The issue was not a military objective, was it? ...”
We could trade sarcastic digs all day or night, but I didn’t have to read minds. I was involved in the planning process for almost all my time on active duty, which ultimately totaled 24 and a half years.
Nobody had to read minds. The methods devised in the early 1940s are still in use; the originators were quite clear about their thinking and documented all they did quite thoroughly.
Forum members need to give up their conceit that they ought to be taken seriously, when offering moral critiques of Allied actions taken in the Second World War. No one is asking them to give up their opinions, but the rest of us are under no obligation to take their opinions seriously.
This is an interesting thread minus the pissing contests and always an interesting topic. Victor Davis Hanson is definitely worth reading and listening to about this topic and he definitely has a different take. The history of WWII is so massive and involved so many parts and personalities that you could spend a lifetime studying it and still learn something new or realize something different than you thought. In many ways it is the story of the blind men examining an elephant - what you see is dependent on where you are standing.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with such a new and powerful weapon captures our imagination and even shocks us due to the sheer power of the atom. These weapons truly did change the world and how we viewed war, security, peace, and stability. That has not changed today and people still see the issue from where they are standing.
There was a culmination of realizations that led the Emperor to cast his vote for surrender and most of them have been mentioned here. Russia’s entry into the conflict through Manchuria and their power grab that continued even past surrender was a big factor often overlooked or glossed over here in the U.S. The air campaign and blockade by the U.S. on the home islands was another big factor. The lack of resources and horrific famine in Japan was a big factor. We could have destroyed most of their food supply as well as their cities. Having read a fair bit on the subject I think there is no single factor that decided the conflict - it was the culmination of many that descended like an inevitable cloud.
One point that is undeniable is that the pending arrival of the bomber fleet from the European theater after VE Day would have made an intolerable situation in Japan four times worse and as structures disappeared we would have likely targeted their agriculture. It is impossible to comprehend the damage that would have been inflicted on an isolated and blockaded Japan with that many bombers or the human horror that would have resulted. The amount of assembled air power to include fighter aircraft hitting anything that moved would have been incomprehensible. I would argue that it would have ultimately been far worse than the two bombs we dropped (and more of those were coming) in scope and damage. The shelling by warships along the coast would have increased greatly as Japan’s ability to fight continued to erode. It would have been the kind of horror that a nation would be unlikely to recover from.
The downside to the blockade and bombing campaign was never fully realized when you extrapolate it out to months or even a year or longer. There is no way to predict how far and how much of Eastern Asia and potentially the Middle East that Stalin would have grabbed during this time either, but he was grabbing it and had every intention to grab even more. Stalin would have eventually looked to Japan after he acquired all that he wanted, but there would not have been much of Japan left. The map of the world and last half of the century would have been much different and real conflict between the Allies and Russia might have been inevitable as we focused on Japan and Russia, with an unstoppable army, focused on the conquest of lands and people. Japan might not have ever recovered if the blockade and bombing campaign had been fully implemented with the forces from the European theater.
I ordered VDH’s “The Second World Wars”, but have not yet read it. It should be interesting and I have enjoyed watching many youtube videos of talks he has given on the subject. FRegards
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