I feel like the narrative surrounding the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has changed enormously since I was a kid.
I remember learning that, while tragic, the number of lives lost in the bombing paled in comparison to the numbers of lives being lost and that would be lost in winning the war by conventional means. That it was a way to minimize further bloodshed.
I’m not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?
I’m mostly just trying to figure out what caused the shift.
Up until 10ish years ago I had at least a better than average understanding/knowledge of WWII
My ex’s grandmother’s family was from Hiroshima and they had family members killed in the bombing.
All that said as tragic as they were I still think those bombs were the correct military decision at that time. I would be willing to have a rational conversation about it though.
The situation in Gaza is completely different and Lindsey Graham and the rest of the GOP are fucking ghouls.
Also, I have always thought that, as horrific and tragic as what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the fact that the world was able to view the aftermath has been what has prevented a larger nuclear exchange. I don’t know if the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone the same way without everyone knowing exactly what an atomic bomb does.
Is your argument for bombing being the right decision the same (that it resulted in less bloodshed overall)? If so, how can you estimate the body count of the alternative (a prolonged conventional war, I assume)?
I mean, you could project based on the casualties already incurred I suppose.
Looks to be about 65k Americans military members died in the Pacific theater, and we were still a long ways off from reaching mainland Japan, and the fighting was only gonna get worse the farther in we got.
And that’s just Americans. It doesn’t count the Japanese casualties, which by all accounts dwarfed the American numbers.
200k civilians were killed in the atomic bombings. Now, it’s worth noting that those are civilian deaths, which one can argue have a higher moral weight than combatant deaths.
So, all that said, in plain numbers I think it’s an extremely safe bet that far more than 200k more people would have died in a blockade/land invasion scenario. But, you could argue that it’s apples to oranges since the bombs were on civilian targets.
It’s also worth noting to that the 200k dead to resolve the war were all non-American, which doesn’t make it any less of a tragic loss of life, but matters in the “political” sense. If you are at war, and you are handed a solution that can end the war without sending any more of your own people to die, do you as the leader have a moral responsibility to do it? Like, if you have the choice in front of you to either bomb a civilian target, killing 200k “enemy” civilians but ending the war, or sending even 100k American’s to their deaths, knowing that you are the one responsible for making sure those men and women get home safe, can you in good conscience choose the latter? Is it better to choose the latter?
I wouldn’t want to have to make that decision, but I also am loathe to second guess the decision of the person who has to make it.
To this day gaman or Japanese stoicism is a big part of Japanese culture. The Japanese had already lost the war, but the ruling class was willing to sacrifice scores of people to fight to the bitter end.
In an episode of Hardcore History, it detailed that the Allied ships couldn’t dock in Okinawa because of all the corpses in the water. The Japanese had inundated Okinawa with propaganda that the Americans were going to rape them all. Many families killed themselves. And the invasion of the mainland was only going to get bloodier.
A terrible as it is to say, dropping the nukes was the more humane option of the two.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
I remember watching it. The problem with the video is that they seriously overestimate the willingness of the Japanese to surrender without giving any evidence to back this up. The Japanese were absolutely not willing to surrender. I mean, just look at their reaction after Hiroshima. There was a lot of debate AFTER an entire city had been razed to the ground. Japan was absolutely not going to surrender without a nuke being dropped.
The Japanese were attempting to negotiate surrender with the “neutral” USSR prior to the nuclear bombs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan The US wanted an unconditional surrender which included the destruction of the Japanese emperor, who at the time, was the head of the Japanese religion. To put this into perspective, consider the United States request similar to requesting the destruction of the Pope within the Vatican. Because of this, the Japanese were seeking better terms of surrender which did not involved the removal of their religious leader. What the Japanese did not know at the time was the USSR was not a neutral party, and they were secretly mobilizing their forces on mainland Asia due to an agreement Stalin made with FDR prior to the US entering the war in Europe.
The reality is, once Japan learned that the USSR was not neutral and they were going to be fighting the US and the USSR in a two front war, this is when the emperor forced Japan to surrender.
To put things into perspective, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were sadly, just another two cities leveled by the US. The US were performing night carpet bombing on Japanese cities as soon as 1944. Many of these raids leveled several square km of urban areas. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217. This is why people argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably not the catalyst to Japan’s surrender because the US have been leveling Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, long before the two nuclear bombs were dropped. None of these raids caused Japan to surrender before.
Yikes 2 hours and 20 minutes. I’ll try to watch as much as I can today, but probably can’t get through the whole thing. Any high points I should watch?
Been a while since I watched it, like I said I’d recommend listening to it. Treat it like a podcast, for me the time flew by and I ended up listening to every video he has over the following weeks. 😂
I wasn’t planning on spending my morning watching a 2 and a half hour YouTube video, but here we are and that’s exactly what happened. That was a fascinating watch. I’d say for others that the TLDW is this:
The narrative that the atomic bombs were dropped to prevent an invasion of Japan is false and was constructed afterwards as a plausible and easy to understand solution that allowed all parties (both the US and Japan) to come out looking good in the end.
The reality of the situation was much more complicated. At the time, there was never a US plan to invade Japan.
Japan was already thoroughly defeated militarily and was looking to negotiate a surrender. Japan was hoping that Russia would be useful to negotiate peace with the US.
The US had previously asked Russia to enter the war, but then later realized it was not necessary to bring about an end to the war. The US actually realized having Russia involved would complicate the post-war logistics and would bolster Russia as a world super power. When sending terms of surrender to Japan, the US removed Russia as a signer of the terms, leaving Japan a false hope that Russia could still be used help them secure better terms.
Russia informed the US that they would be declaring war with Japan on August 15. The US dropped the bombs on Japan a week earlier in hopes of accelerating Japan’s surrender before Russia entered the war.
As a result, Russia declared war on Japan in the days between the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan issued their surrender shortly afterwards. In all likelihood, dropping the bombs accelerated the surrender timeline by about a week. Though it could be argued that had Russia’s signature been kept on the surrender terms sent to Japan, it would have also ended the war earlier.
Isn’t he fantastic? His videos are so well-researched and well-written that I’d listen to his vaguely monotonous scouse voice talk about pretty much anything.
Yeah it really was a good watch. The length and minimal use of graphics at first were intimidating, but he still kept it interesting so it was easy to absorb.
It depends whether you think killing 200,000+ civilians is a defensible act.
300,000+ if you include the bombing of Tokyo.
Nobody knows how a conventional war would have played out. To assert civilian deaths would have been higher is pure speculation and a gross attempt to justify the slaughter of noncombatants.
Though it is likely that even without nukes, the US would have still razed these cities with conventional munitions, given the events in Tokyo.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
The cognitive dissonance is fascinating. The Hammas attack on 10/7 is all but universally condemned in public discourse because civillians were targeted. Even die-hard militant anti-Zionists will not attempt to justify the Hammas attacks because they know it will only turn the public against them. When a brown force attacks civillians, it is terrorism and reviled.
Here on lemmy.world condemnation of Israel’s indiscriminant bombing is also prevalent. Maybe 5%-10% of commenters support Israel’s conduct. But of the at least eight people who have expressed an opinion on nuking Japan here in this thread, roughly 75% of them defend it as justifiable and no one has outright said it was wrong.
There are over 100,000 American WWII veterans alive today. They saved the world from the Nazis. We love that for us. Coming out of WWII, we dove right into the cold war. We were battling the USSR for the hearts and minds of the globe. McCarthyism silenced internal criticism. We had no patience for second-guessing our actions in WWII. It was our patriotic duty to convince the world that ours was the side of freedom, democracy, and justice.
So for 80 years now our culture has been saturated with propaganda promoting our glorious, righteous role in WWII. You, your parents, and your parents’ parents have been told the same thing in school and have seen the same messages in TV, books, and movies. And I’m not saying it’s all a lie. Sure, the defeat of Hitler was a high point in American history. But our understanding of our role lacks any nuance or self-criticism. For example, the Russian front was arguably more crucial to the fall of Germany than the Western front. Churchill is hailed as a hero, but he was an antisemeticracist. E.g.:
WINSTON CHURCHILL published a newspaper article. It was February 8, 1920. Churchill had a different enemy now. Now his enemy wasn’t Germany, it was the “sinister confederacy” of international Jewry.
“This movement among the Jews is not new,” Churchill said. It was a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” He listed Marx, Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman as some of the malefactors. The conspiracy had been, he said, the “mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.” It had played a recognizable part in the French Revolution. All loyal Jews, he advised, must “vindicate the honour of the Jewish name” by rejecting international bolshevism.
And:
“I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them,” Churchill wrote Trenchard. Churchill was an expert on the effects of mustard gas—he knew that it could blind and kill, especially children and infants. Gas spreads a “lively terror,” he pointed out in an earlier memo; he didn’t understand the prevailing squeamishness about its use: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” Most of those gassed wouldn’t have “serious permanent effects,” he said.
And likewise, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unconscionable acts of evil. It is never acceptable to target civillian populations. It wasn’t acceptable on 9/11/2001 or 10/7/2023 when brown Arabs did it, and it wasn’t acceptable when white Americans did it either.
This is obvious to anyone who wasn’t raised inside the Western bubble.
There’s also the possibility that because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons have never since been used. What would cold war been like in that case?
I’m not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?
The issue is that unconditional support of past American actions is no longer acceptable, and so all America’s past actions are being re-evaluated. This is good! However, this also often results in people simply taking the reverse position than the accepted one. This is bad.
The atomic bombings were less bloody than a blockade or an invasion would have been, and the people who claim the Soviet Union was going to successfully invade the home islands or that Japan was about to surrender under any terms that would have been considered reasonable, pinky-promise, are just misinformed or deluded.
I feel like the narrative surrounding the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has changed enormously since I was a kid.
I remember learning that, while tragic, the number of lives lost in the bombing paled in comparison to the numbers of lives being lost and that would be lost in winning the war by conventional means. That it was a way to minimize further bloodshed.
I’m not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?
I’m mostly just trying to figure out what caused the shift.
Some disclaimers
I am a 50+ year old American
Up until 10ish years ago I had at least a better than average understanding/knowledge of WWII
My ex’s grandmother’s family was from Hiroshima and they had family members killed in the bombing.
All that said as tragic as they were I still think those bombs were the correct military decision at that time. I would be willing to have a rational conversation about it though.
The situation in Gaza is completely different and Lindsey Graham and the rest of the GOP are fucking ghouls.
Also, I have always thought that, as horrific and tragic as what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the fact that the world was able to view the aftermath has been what has prevented a larger nuclear exchange. I don’t know if the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone the same way without everyone knowing exactly what an atomic bomb does.
Is your argument for bombing being the right decision the same (that it resulted in less bloodshed overall)? If so, how can you estimate the body count of the alternative (a prolonged conventional war, I assume)?
I mean, you could project based on the casualties already incurred I suppose.
Looks to be about 65k Americans military members died in the Pacific theater, and we were still a long ways off from reaching mainland Japan, and the fighting was only gonna get worse the farther in we got. And that’s just Americans. It doesn’t count the Japanese casualties, which by all accounts dwarfed the American numbers.
200k civilians were killed in the atomic bombings. Now, it’s worth noting that those are civilian deaths, which one can argue have a higher moral weight than combatant deaths.
So, all that said, in plain numbers I think it’s an extremely safe bet that far more than 200k more people would have died in a blockade/land invasion scenario. But, you could argue that it’s apples to oranges since the bombs were on civilian targets.
It’s also worth noting to that the 200k dead to resolve the war were all non-American, which doesn’t make it any less of a tragic loss of life, but matters in the “political” sense. If you are at war, and you are handed a solution that can end the war without sending any more of your own people to die, do you as the leader have a moral responsibility to do it? Like, if you have the choice in front of you to either bomb a civilian target, killing 200k “enemy” civilians but ending the war, or sending even 100k American’s to their deaths, knowing that you are the one responsible for making sure those men and women get home safe, can you in good conscience choose the latter? Is it better to choose the latter? I wouldn’t want to have to make that decision, but I also am loathe to second guess the decision of the person who has to make it.
deleted by creator
To this day gaman or Japanese stoicism is a big part of Japanese culture. The Japanese had already lost the war, but the ruling class was willing to sacrifice scores of people to fight to the bitter end.
In an episode of Hardcore History, it detailed that the Allied ships couldn’t dock in Okinawa because of all the corpses in the water. The Japanese had inundated Okinawa with propaganda that the Americans were going to rape them all. Many families killed themselves. And the invasion of the mainland was only going to get bloodier.
A terrible as it is to say, dropping the nukes was the more humane option of the two.
Back in HS, I think I was told that it was a regrettable ending and we probably went a bit overboard.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
I remember watching it. The problem with the video is that they seriously overestimate the willingness of the Japanese to surrender without giving any evidence to back this up. The Japanese were absolutely not willing to surrender. I mean, just look at their reaction after Hiroshima. There was a lot of debate AFTER an entire city had been razed to the ground. Japan was absolutely not going to surrender without a nuke being dropped.
The Japanese were attempting to negotiate surrender with the “neutral” USSR prior to the nuclear bombs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan The US wanted an unconditional surrender which included the destruction of the Japanese emperor, who at the time, was the head of the Japanese religion. To put this into perspective, consider the United States request similar to requesting the destruction of the Pope within the Vatican. Because of this, the Japanese were seeking better terms of surrender which did not involved the removal of their religious leader. What the Japanese did not know at the time was the USSR was not a neutral party, and they were secretly mobilizing their forces on mainland Asia due to an agreement Stalin made with FDR prior to the US entering the war in Europe.
The reality is, once Japan learned that the USSR was not neutral and they were going to be fighting the US and the USSR in a two front war, this is when the emperor forced Japan to surrender.
To put things into perspective, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were sadly, just another two cities leveled by the US. The US were performing night carpet bombing on Japanese cities as soon as 1944. Many of these raids leveled several square km of urban areas. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217. This is why people argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably not the catalyst to Japan’s surrender because the US have been leveling Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, long before the two nuclear bombs were dropped. None of these raids caused Japan to surrender before.
Yikes 2 hours and 20 minutes. I’ll try to watch as much as I can today, but probably can’t get through the whole thing. Any high points I should watch?
Been a while since I watched it, like I said I’d recommend listening to it. Treat it like a podcast, for me the time flew by and I ended up listening to every video he has over the following weeks. 😂
I wasn’t planning on spending my morning watching a 2 and a half hour YouTube video, but here we are and that’s exactly what happened. That was a fascinating watch. I’d say for others that the TLDW is this:
The narrative that the atomic bombs were dropped to prevent an invasion of Japan is false and was constructed afterwards as a plausible and easy to understand solution that allowed all parties (both the US and Japan) to come out looking good in the end.
The reality of the situation was much more complicated. At the time, there was never a US plan to invade Japan.
Japan was already thoroughly defeated militarily and was looking to negotiate a surrender. Japan was hoping that Russia would be useful to negotiate peace with the US.
The US had previously asked Russia to enter the war, but then later realized it was not necessary to bring about an end to the war. The US actually realized having Russia involved would complicate the post-war logistics and would bolster Russia as a world super power. When sending terms of surrender to Japan, the US removed Russia as a signer of the terms, leaving Japan a false hope that Russia could still be used help them secure better terms.
Russia informed the US that they would be declaring war with Japan on August 15. The US dropped the bombs on Japan a week earlier in hopes of accelerating Japan’s surrender before Russia entered the war.
As a result, Russia declared war on Japan in the days between the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan issued their surrender shortly afterwards. In all likelihood, dropping the bombs accelerated the surrender timeline by about a week. Though it could be argued that had Russia’s signature been kept on the surrender terms sent to Japan, it would have also ended the war earlier.
Isn’t he fantastic? His videos are so well-researched and well-written that I’d listen to his vaguely monotonous scouse voice talk about pretty much anything.
Yeah it really was a good watch. The length and minimal use of graphics at first were intimidating, but he still kept it interesting so it was easy to absorb.
It depends whether you think killing 200,000+ civilians is a defensible act.
300,000+ if you include the bombing of Tokyo.
Nobody knows how a conventional war would have played out. To assert civilian deaths would have been higher is pure speculation and a gross attempt to justify the slaughter of noncombatants.
Though it is likely that even without nukes, the US would have still razed these cities with conventional munitions, given the events in Tokyo.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
There is a book I liked about this, it is about Allied civilian bombing in WWII in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Dead_Cities
It’s by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, needless to say ‘Responses were divided.’
The cognitive dissonance is fascinating. The Hammas attack on 10/7 is all but universally condemned in public discourse because civillians were targeted. Even die-hard militant anti-Zionists will not attempt to justify the Hammas attacks because they know it will only turn the public against them. When a brown force attacks civillians, it is terrorism and reviled.
Here on lemmy.world condemnation of Israel’s indiscriminant bombing is also prevalent. Maybe 5%-10% of commenters support Israel’s conduct. But of the at least eight people who have expressed an opinion on nuking Japan here in this thread, roughly 75% of them defend it as justifiable and no one has outright said it was wrong.
There are over 100,000 American WWII veterans alive today. They saved the world from the Nazis. We love that for us. Coming out of WWII, we dove right into the cold war. We were battling the USSR for the hearts and minds of the globe. McCarthyism silenced internal criticism. We had no patience for second-guessing our actions in WWII. It was our patriotic duty to convince the world that ours was the side of freedom, democracy, and justice.
So for 80 years now our culture has been saturated with propaganda promoting our glorious, righteous role in WWII. You, your parents, and your parents’ parents have been told the same thing in school and have seen the same messages in TV, books, and movies. And I’m not saying it’s all a lie. Sure, the defeat of Hitler was a high point in American history. But our understanding of our role lacks any nuance or self-criticism. For example, the Russian front was arguably more crucial to the fall of Germany than the Western front. Churchill is hailed as a hero, but he was an antisemetic racist. E.g.:
And:
Churchill’s War Cabinet ignored the repeated pleas of the British colonial government in India for food aid, allowing between one and four million people to die of hunger in 1943 and 1944.
Churchill was a horrible person.
And likewise, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unconscionable acts of evil. It is never acceptable to target civillian populations. It wasn’t acceptable on 9/11/2001 or 10/7/2023 when brown Arabs did it, and it wasn’t acceptable when white Americans did it either.
This is obvious to anyone who wasn’t raised inside the Western bubble.
There’s also the possibility that because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons have never since been used. What would cold war been like in that case?
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deleted by creator
My understanding is that even after Hiroshima, the Imperial Army attempted a coup to avoid surrender.
The Japanese were not stopping. The only alternative at hand was a full invasion, which would have killed many, many more.
The issue is that unconditional support of past American actions is no longer acceptable, and so all America’s past actions are being re-evaluated. This is good! However, this also often results in people simply taking the reverse position than the accepted one. This is bad.
The atomic bombings were less bloody than a blockade or an invasion would have been, and the people who claim the Soviet Union was going to successfully invade the home islands or that Japan was about to surrender under any terms that would have been considered reasonable, pinky-promise, are just misinformed or deluded.