Can anyone tell me why dropping a couple of atomic bombs is considered by many to be so much worse than starving an entire nation? Even the name, "Operation Starvation," is horrifying.
Not mentioned in the above essay: If the whole nation of Japan were starving, prisoners would NOT have been well fed. [Quite the contrary. The first President Bush's "Flyboy" companions who were captured were subject to cannibalism.]
The Japanese had no respect for prisoners because of their own warrior code. Their prisoners suffered a horrendously high death rate: 35% of US soldiers died in Japanese captivity compared to less than one percent of those held by Germans. As former POW and later diplomat John Fletcher-Cooke wrote, “Few, if any POWs would have got out of Japan alive if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”
To-the-death fanaticism was a major reason to use atomic bombs: to end the war with as few deaths as possible on both sides.
That is an interesting question, isn't it? And you're absolutely correct. If Japan hadn't surrendered in 1945, by 1946 hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people would have starved to death. The 1945 harvest was extremely poor. The mining paralyzed the coastal shipping that was Japan's main transportation system, and the Air Force's next target was going to be the rail system. Japan had no real highway network at that time. There would have been little food and no way to get it to the cities anyway.
As it was, even after Japan surrendered it was saved from mass starvation only by huge quantities of food supplied by the U.S. at the insistence of MacArthur.
But all that apperently would have been okay according to some because they would have died of "natural" causes and not radiation from the evil bomb.
That one's easy. The answer is "because some people are idiots." ;^)
Not just the mining, but the majority of the Japanese Merchant Shipping was sunk, for a nation that depeneded on imports for almost everything, that was disasterous. The firebombing of cities killed and injured more people than the atomic bombs. Late in the war carrier groups were launching raids on the mainland in addition to the strategic bombing.
Yet the Japanese military was willing to continue fighting. It took the atomic bombs to convince them there was no alternative to surrender.
It's only considered that by the uneducated. Japan is rarely mentioned for their brutality and fanaticism, even though we know it to be true. We had a word to hang on the Germans, Nazi, but nothing for the Japanese. What if we had dropped the bomb on Berlin? Would we today continue to hear the outrage from those who don't understand war?
Good morning by the way. ;-)
One of the reasons I have heard of for folks getting upset with the use of the atomic weapons goes like this.
Most people don't mind death by retail, it's death by wholesale that upsets them.
GATOR NAVY had it right, by the summer of 1945 Japan was a wreck. Most of the merchant fleet was on the bottom of the ocean. Japan relied on imports from China and Korea for food. And correct me if I am wrong GN but the winter of 45/46 was unusually cold and would have wreaked on more havoc on Japan if the war had not ended.
Lost in all the handwringing over the deaths at Hiroshima nad Nagasaki are the lives that were not lost, both Japanese and Allied, because Japan was not invaded in the fall of 1945.
Sorry for the late reply, long day at work.
Regards
alfa6 ;>}