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Hiroshima (1946)

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Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#251

Post by yes_really »

karlgkk wrote: post #243
yes_really wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives FYI it is estimated that the war would go on until 1947 if the bombs were not dropped. There would be millions of American lives lost in that case.

> FYI it is estimated that the war would go on until 1947 if the bombs were not dropped FYI it is also estimated that the war would end within a few months if the bombs were not dropped. It really depends on whoever was estimating lol This is a heavily contested issue that has been actively discussed for almost a century by full time professional historians and analysts. Making confident assertions isn’t particularly…

What is the argument that the war would have ended in a few months? Is it that the US would have reached Tokyo by then? Or Japan would have surrendered before then? Both are hard to believe

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#252

Post by yes_really »

yes_really wrote: post #250
JohnKemeny wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Look what you made me do!" By the way: that same argument is used by Netanyahu and Putin today!

I guess technically Japan didn't "make" the US drop the bombs, they just started a war against the US and brought them into a situation where they had to choose between continuing to send millions of its soldiers to die in the the deadliest war of all time, or defending itself against the aggressor by dropping the bombs. Are you happy with that? Likewise, I guess technically Hamas didn't "make" Israel defend itself.…

BTW: it doesn't make sene to compare to Russia. Japan obviously attacked the US. Hamas obviously attacked Israel. Ukraine did not attack Russia.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#253

Post by hulitu »

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…

> The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through

Why didn't they drop the bomb in Tokio then ? This surely would have been more convincing for the emperor.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#254

Post by 542354234235 »

slg wrote: post #244
throw0101d wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are options like dropping the bomb in Tokyo Bay, further off the coast, or in less populated areas not treated as serious alternatives? Why did the bombs have to be dropped on cities? To show their destructive power. That one plane could do as much damage as dozens / hundreds. What would blowing up water show? What would blowing up an empty field show? What would blowing up an already-flatten city (like Tokyo)…

>To show their destructive power. That one plane could do as much damage as dozens / hundreds. >What would blowing up water show? What would blowing up an empty field show? What would blowing up an already-flatten city (like Tokyo) show? There is no shock value to dropping an atomic bomb on a non-target. Is knocking down buildings the only way people can perceive the power of a bomb? Would a huge mushroom cloud over…

>I don't know why you seem to believe that the only path to surrender was the exact events that transpired.

Maybe dropping the bombs in Tokyo Bay would have changed things. Maybe writing the emperor a love song would have changed things. We don't know. There are two aspects that get mixed together with this.

>Given the situation and knowledge at the time, was this or that military action reasonable and necessary?

>Knowing things unknowable at the time, can we now say this or that military action was unnecessary?

I think it is clear that the first question is yes, it was a reasonable and necessary decision at the time.

The second question is interesting to think about, but I think you are getting so much pushback because you are mixing both questions, using after the fact "what ifs" to say what people should have done at the time, as if they could just try different things and get a do over if it didn't work.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#255

Post by 542354234235 »

Symmetry wrote: post #207
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…

One important thing the US could have done to get the Japanese to surrender without dropping the bomb would have been to promise that Japan would not be turned into a republic after the war but allowed to keep its imperial family as ceremonial heads of state. As, you know, actually happened after they surrendered. Promising to do what we actually did would have been more than enough to save a huge number of lives, an…

But you don't know that promising that wouldn't have emoldened the Japanese leadership. That they wouldn't have seen that as a weakening of Allied resolve and a willingness to end the war on Japan's terms. Japan was already using Iwo Jima and Okinawa to fight to the last man while exacting high American causalities, in an attempt to make the US reassess the cost of taking mainland Japan.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#256

Post by 542354234235 »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #184
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…

Much of what you state is basically true, but bear in mind that other options, that didn't involve nuclear terror, would still have worked, and weren't used for reasons a bit more cynical than exasperation at Japanese truculence, or mere ignorance of radiation's insidious effects (which wasn't as deep as one might think, even in 1945).. Even without concretely knowing just how long the Japanese government would attem…

>the U.S. could have -and knew they could have- simply sealed off the Japanese Home Islands and starved them into submission while continuing to bomb their cities to ashes with ordinary bombs.

A blockade was estimated to kill multiple millions of Japanese. The reason to avoid this was not because it was less glorious, but because it was far more horrific for the Japanese.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#257

Post by 542354234235 »

opo wrote: post #135
alexjplant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

Don't forget the thousands of civilians that committed suicide. There are accounts of soldier interpreters pleading with civilians through loudspeakers on their ship to just surrender and be taken care of, while they jumped from cliffs into the sea. Every option (invasion, mass starvation via blockade, atomic bombing) was a horrific nightmare of death for the Japanese.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#258

Post by throwanem »

throw0101d wrote: post #236
Synaesthesia wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are horrendous war crimes. The only reason they aren't called as such is we were the victors. The conduct of the allies in WW2 was atrocious.

> They are horrendous war crimes. The only reason they aren't called as such is we were the victors. Who says they aren't called it? LeMay, for one, recognized it. * https://iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/outputs/undergraduate/If-We-Ha... There is a paradox called “logical insanity.” The novel Catch 22 deals with this irony: basically, the idea was that the war was killing thousands daily, so in order to end it as fast as pos…

If you're going to rip off one of Dan Carlin's show titles this way, be so courteous as to provide the reference. It's pretty good, as so is a lot of his stuff, him hailing from back when podcasts were still delivered synchronously via terrestrial broadcast.

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-42-blitz-...

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#259

Post by 542354234235 »

wouterjanl wrote: post #100

Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in…

Would you let someone beat you to death? Would you let them beat your children to death? If you shot them or stabbed them or hit them in the back of the head with a shovel, would you say it was ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ or would that be a symptom of the 'same thinking'? War is terrible, but it is pretty naive to lament Hiroshima as if it existed in isolation, and not in the context of an aggressive imperialist Japan epitomized in the rape of Nanking. While these things need to be explored and looked at, we also need to recognize that death camps and genocide were happening every day the Nazis and Japanese empire were still fighting.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#260

Post by marssaxman »

hulitu wrote: post #253
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…

> The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through Why didn't they drop the bomb in Tokio then ? This surely would have been more convincing for the emperor.

The Americans had already bombed Tokyo into ruins five months prior, killing at least 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless. It was the most violent air raid in history, doing more damage than either of the atomic bombings. The Japanese did not surrender.

The point of Hiroshima was not that the USAF could destroy a city, because they had already done that sixty-seven times over the preceding year, but that they could now do it with a single plane and a single bomb. They specifically selected a city which had never been raided before so it would be clear that all the damage had been done by the new weapon.

The Japanese were used to watching hundreds of American bombers destroy a city overnight. Now they had to fear a raid in which hundreds of bombers destroyed hundreds of cities overnight, and then the war would be over because their society would no longer exist.

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