Hiroshima: a (probably overly long) exposé

[Geronimo]

Jefftest has convinced me that if the bombs were what motivated the emperor to surrender then indeed the atomic bombs spared far more lives than they took.

But I think the intentional targeting of civilians in places of very limited military value, whether they were targeted with atom bombs or napalm certainly was grossly immoral. I think people dwell too much on the relative 'merits' of atom bombs vs conventional weapons and not enough on the total indifference to civilian suffering with which all manner of weapoins were used in ww2.

[Sprayber]

It was a ****ing war. The objective was the complete destruction of the enemy both then and for the future. Nothing much left to expose if you ask me..

[Dis]

you don't think racism had anything to do with the use of the bomb?

I doubt they would have used it on the germans.

[Drogue]

They used the bomb because that's the way the fewest US casualties would occur. I don't agree with people trying to argue it saved lives overall, it didn't, but it did save US lives. The us government is there to represent US citizens, and to that end, they did the right thing. From a worldwide perspective, I'd say they didn't, as an invasion would have causes less loss of life in total. To care about your enemy in a war is to put yourself at a disadvantage. I'd admire those that did, but I wouldn't expect it from anyone.

[Deity Dude]

Jefftest said it better then I could and is absolutely right.

The "bomb" saved 100,000's of lives (if not millions) on all sides.

It's unfortunate that 200,000 had to die save so amny more.

As a side note, I shudder to think what would have happened if Japan had developed the atomic bomb, in say, 1941.

[Drogue]

The bomb killed hundreds of thousands, and by most estimates, saved tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. A full frontal assault would have lost fewer than the bomb overall, just would have cost more US lives.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Dissident
you don't think racism had anything to do with the use of the bomb?

I doubt they would have used it on the germans.

umm, it was developed with the intention of using it on the germans

it was only used on Japan because the Germans were finished

Jon Miller

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Drogue
The bomb killed hundreds of thousands, and by most estimates, saved tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. A full frontal assault would have lost fewer than the bomb overall, just would have cost more US lives.

but normal napalm bombing, which we were doing anyways, was killing 100000s...

and where is this most estimates?

I have seen far more claim 100000s than 10000s

remember, the japanese always lost far more men than the US (sometimes by an order of magnitude)

and if was city fighting, than it would be women and children

you can just look at the city fighting in east europe to see how devistating and desctructive it would be to both sides

Jon Miller

[Jon Miller]

Re: Hiroshima: a (probably overly long) exposé

Originally posted by Admiral


On a personal level, I went through high school believing that an invasion was necessary, and that the bomb saved lives. Youth were (and still are) being taught a convienient version of history. But we are a democracy, and live in a country of free speech. Why must certain aspects of our heritage be hidden from us? Do we have to lie about everything we do that doesn't fit our image of ourselves?
The point, for me, is that, basically, I thought we were better than this.
Discuss.

I note that you keep quoting the same source

it would be nice if you had more sources

Jon miller

[Jon Miller]

tarawa:
US ~ 3,000 casualties
Japan ~ 4,683 dead

iowa jima:
US ~ 26,000 casualties
Japan ~ 18,917 dead

okinowa:
US ~ 49,151 casualties
Japan ~ 110,000 dead

if there was a fight, and if only ~130,000 japanese fought, as many would die as in the two nuke blasts

and remember that there were not many citizens in at least two of those battles, in japan the fighting would have been in cities

Jon Miller
(I am actually unsure of the necessity of the second blast, but am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt)

[Deity Dude]

Drogue...

There were 250,000 civllians dying per month in the Japanese occupied territorries.

Without the bomb the USSR and Japanese conflict would have continued. I'm sure some people died in that conflict.

If there was no bomb, the final US decision would probably have been a blockade combined with continued firebombings anda major bombing of the transportation network. (as Jefftest pointed out, this would have led to massive starvation in Japan) With the possible exception of an invasion in the north to prevent a Soviet occupation.

Unfortuanately, was unwilling to surrender until 2 atomic bombs were dropped (and then only grudgingly).

The point is US casualties would have been minimal without a bombing because there was no need to invade. Why lose close to a million Americans when u can put the island under siege. The lives that were saved were the millions of Japanese that didnt starve and the millions in the occupied territories that were dropping like flies.

BTW, Japan started the war, was extremely brutal to all of its enemies throughout the war and certainly didn't mind if their people or others died.

Sometimes you're just not left a clean choice.

[Jon Miller]

btw, to see how city war fair was for the civilians

in stalingrad (USSR ~.5 m dead, Nazis ~.3 m dead)

The population of Stalingrad - now Volgograd - fell from 850,000 to just 1,500 at the end of the war.

I figure that there would probably have been ~1 m casualties at the minimum if the war was allowed to continue

besides all the damage Japan was doing to other territories

Jon Miller

[Dry]

Let me see if I understand you well Jefftest

So, on one side, we have the Japanese, ready for

... "One Hundred Million Will Die for the Emperor and Nation" ...

even tfrom slow starvation:

... Some estimates say that over 10 MILLION civillians would have starved due to problems in transporting the rice that would be available, ...

And this, seemed to be very well known in the US

... Marshall then learned from the Magic Summaries ...

So, if they are ready for millions deads, Truman knows that 100,000 is certainly not enough for a surrender. As a proof, the bombing of Tokyo.

... And 100,000 killed in this firebombing ...

and [Truman thinks] that the death by A-bomb is not worst than a firebombing or starvation

... is sooooo much better than 100,000 killed in an atomic bombing exactly how? ... Because it's just oh so much worse to die in a blast or of eeeeevil radiation, than to starve to death slowly over the course of several months with your belly distended, helplessly watching your family slowly die too. ...

So, as you say:

... This is the context. Now, at this point, Truman has a shot at ending the war quickly and decisively, using what they think of at the time as basically just a really big conventional bomb. What realistic alternative do you see?

Ok, let me try:
Now, at this point, Truman thinks to himself: "A people ready to sacrifice the entire nation, to die from starvation by millions, is not ready to surrender if we firebomb Tokyo. BUT... these same people will certainly surrender if we bomb some provincial city with just a really big conventional bomb. So, gentlemen, let's kill only a few 100K of them instead of millions. They will be so scared by dying fast and in so small amounts that they will surrender."

Uh ?!? Does not sounds very realistic to me...

Common, be serious. I do not believe they were not ready to surrender. Neither were they ready to surrender.
I believe they were divided.
The gambit of "let's drop a really big conventional bomb, on those crazy millions of kamikaze, kill a few hundred thousands and we hope they will surrender", sounds far too unrealistic, too risky, to be played on the info Jefftest gave us.
I think the US knew what they were doing.
I believe the US knew that some Japanese were ready for surrender, but those Japanese were weak, a minority among the militaristic class.
Those guys needed a psychological moment to propose surrender to their countrymen, a moment that also allowed them not to lose face, very important to Asians.
I think there were contacts between those guys and the US.
The A-bomb allowed them to surrender without losing face.
The Japan vase, at that time, was fragile and ripe for the psychological push.

I don't know what would have happen without the A-bomb, but I will say neither that it was needed, nor that it was useless.
It was the choice that had to be made... and maybe... I say maybe ... that the intimidation of the russians was only the small point that helped making a decision.
I agree that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indeed sacrificed, that it was needed, that it has shorten the war and reduced the number of victims on both sides.

But I have to confess that Jefftest's propaganstration almost made me believe the exact opposite.

[jefftest]

? I don't see how what you're saying is so different. Truman clearly *hoped* that a sudden blow like this would finally be "enough". Truman was appalled at the prospect of "an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other". But don't doubt that the US would have at its disposal even more terrible tools to prosecute the end of the war. I get the sense you're saying it was a bluff of some sort - I really don't think so. If it had failed, the US was continuing to ramp up the forces to strike Japan.

This may have had a bit to do with it though. From the New York Times:

"One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he "confessed" that the United States had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to destroy Tokyo "in the next few days." The war minister informed the Cabinet of this grim news -- but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the aftermath of the second atomic bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted on surrender and were able to prevail."

Oddly, this was not all *that* far from the truth either. It's not like the 2 bombs were all there was ever going to be. The fissionable core of a 3rd bomb was already on the way to Tinian, and the bomb would be ready to drop by Aug 20th. After that, the US had the capacity to produce at least 3 plutonium bombs per month. The plan was to use about 6 of these in November tactically to support the Olympic landings. 9-12 more would be saved for Coronet in the spring. The rest would be dropped on cities, while the firebombings continued. Eighth Air Force (the guys who had just finished up the bombing campaign against Germany) was being redeployed to the Pacific to add to the bombing of Japan.

The sense I got from the context of the Magic intercepts is that the US was seeing that some parts in the Japanese government were at least beginning to look for some kind of an end to the war - but not being privy to the non-broadcast cabinet meetings, could not tell how serious it was. In fact, from the Magic telegrams, they certainly appeared to be trying all sorts of tricks to squirm out of anything approaching unconditional surrender, and the public proclamations disparaged the Potsdam demand.

My point was mainly that if they didn't surrender relatively soon after Aug 9th, that it was gonna get a *whole* lot worse. August would probably be only incrementally worse: more firebombings, a 3rd atomic attack. But surely by November, either an awfully bloody invasion would be imminent, or, alternatively, the 6 bombs saved to support it would be used on cities. Along with 3 more months of firebombings, from an increasingly large bombing force.

Other parts of the NYT article certainly support what you say:

The Japanese scholarship, by historians like Sadao Asada of Doshisha University in Kyoto, notes that Japanese wartime leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the atomic bombing. The Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up, so the peace faction seized upon the bombing as a new argument to force surrender.

"We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war," Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, said later.

The atomic bombings broke this political stalemate and were thus described by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from heaven."

Without the atomic bombings, Japan would have continued fighting by inertia. This would have meant more firebombing of Japanese cities and a ground invasion, planned for November 1945, of the main Japanese islands. The fighting over the small, sparsely populated islands of Okinawa had killed 14,000 Americans and 200,000 Japanese, and in the main islands the toll would have run into the millions.

Wartime records and memoirs show that the emperor and some of his aides wanted to end the war by summer 1945. But they were vacillating and couldn't prevail over a military that was determined to keep going even if that meant, as a navy official urged at one meeting, "sacrificing 20 million Japanese lives."

I don't see how it is the "reverse" of what I was saying though...

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by techumseh
The Soviets had, at the request of the US, agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated.

Yes, that's the Yalta Conference IIRC.

Originally posted by techumseh
However, the US was determined to head off Soviet occupation of northern China and Korea. Dropping the bomb served 3 purposed: It ended the war quickly, before the Soviet invasion of Mancuria could really get underway, it was intended to intimidate the USSR in the postwar world, and it tested the bomb on people.

The Soviets completely smoked the IJA in Manchuria in about a month.