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Hiroshima (1946)

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Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#131

Post by alex_young »

throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians?

The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#132

Post by ForOldHack »

ekianjo wrote: post #67
pirate787 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the greatest understatement ever written!

the English translation is. In Japanese its not surprising to talk in this way.

Hirohito spoke in a very very rare way that very few humans speak. It took years of a friend who got a masters in 'Peace and conflict studies' to get me to understand, and in the decade since, and after reading Hirohito's book it still takes a significant intellectual effort to distinguish the listening.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#133

Post by udev4096 »

throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

[flagged]

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#134

Post by thomasfl »

Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#135

Post by opo »

alexjplant wrote: post #43
karlgkk wrote: post #30

The atrocities that the Japanese military committed, consistently and repeatedly and combined with their attack on pearl harbor, meant that Americans of the time on the front lines had few qualms or issues with dropping the bomb. Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing…

> Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either. Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell spee…

I find it is important to be skeptical of people's descriptions of what they were supposedly thinking years earlier. Much better is to find contemporaneous accounts. For example:

>...my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,

The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.

>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#136

Post by snickerbockers »

petermcneeley wrote: post #57
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

Under which conditions is nuking a city not a horrific warcrime?

It definitely is a warcrime, but just about every major battle in WWII is a war-crime by modern standards. The concept of warcrimes exists largely because we don't ever want WWII to happen again. Before that there were geneva conventions which defined war crimes but they were far more limited to the extent that even the Nazis were able to come up with supposed justifications for much of what they did based around [according to them, at least] their having not violated the geneva conventions which existed at the time.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined weren't even the biggest war crimes committed by America against the Japanese. I'm avoiding mentioning war-crimes committed by the other side because I don't want to inadvertently make the fallacious argument that they would somehow justify the war crimes we committed, but the argument I do want to make is that these sorts of arguments should be based around who was killed.

Torture is an exception to this because it implies the deliberate infliction of more pain than is necessary to kill the victim, but these sorts of discussions should never be based around the choice of weapon. When I see people constantly criticize the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki at a far greater rate than similar-scale events such as the repeated firebombings of tokyo or even "normal" battles with massive collateral damage such as Okinawa or Berlin it seems to me that the implication is that you would've been fine with America killing 250k people as long as we had done so with conventional weapons.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#137

Post by snickerbockers »

brabel wrote: post #121
petermcneeley wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under which conditions is nuking a city not a horrific warcrime?

Never. They could have blockaded Japan. They could have negotiated with the Russians, as at the time they were “sharing” Germany and were more or less on the same side. They could even just go home, Japan was already no military threat after the horrific fire bombing. The fact that they chose to do the unthinkable, and that Americans defend that decision to this day, goes to show what kind of people they really are.…

America also could've just ditched Europe and let the Nazis rebuild their empire if that's what you want.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#138

Post by defrost »

thomasfl wrote: post #134

Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.

The decision to bomb Hiroshima was made long before the existence of atomic weapons was widely known. They were classified at the highest level and not even Truman knew they existed until he became POTUS after being VP.

Hiroshima was another target, way down the list, of Japanese targets to destroy, beginning with Tokyo, after Allied command determined that simply bombing purely industrial and military targets wasn't enough.

The decision to use an atomic weapon wasn't much debated, at the time, given they were built to counter a supposed German atomic capability that didn't exist and given that Germany had surrendered by the time the atomic weapons were ready for use.

With a massive amount of money invested, German targets being off the board, and Japan nearing it's end it was considered a dwindling window to field test the post Trinity prototypes in anger.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki was chosen as near virgin targets from the existing list of cities scheduled for destruction.

Seventy two Japanese cities were destroyed before they were.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#139

Post by yes_really »

alex_young wrote: post #131
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians? The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?

Japan was the one who started the war. Japan was the aggressor. Defending yourself by winning a war against an aggressor is not a "wrong".

Many more people were saved by dropping the bombs than people died in it. And, while it is a tragedy that those people died, that fault lies with Japan, not the US.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#140

Post by wiseowise »

alex_young wrote: post #131
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians? The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?

Of course it is, much more humane is to mount amphibious assault and kill millions.
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