To think that those who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima were no better than the nazis who masscred the jews

[ReallyTired]

The dropping of the the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocide. The bombs were diliberately intended to kill unarmed civilians. Neither target was military. There was no need for nuclear weapons as Japan was already on its knees.

You have no idea at all what pow's lived through in Japan? Think Isis but worse.

I think YABU OP. Jews in Europe had done nothing to attract murderous intentions. They had not murdered, tortured or waged war on anyone. They were one of many easy scapegoats of a charismatic psychopath.

I think the lessons to be learnt from WWI & WWII (from all sides) was not to follow the powerful, the elite, and the profiteers.

People are brilliant. Difference is stimulating, challenging and worthwhile. It is worth maintaining.

Be aware of differences. And beware if those who try to use differences to make you hate and kill. Because, if you believe them, Wars and War Crimes will hollow.

Oops. follow.

The difference between an a bomb and conventional weapons is the radioactive fall out. Childhood leukaemia had been higher in Hiroshima as a result of the bomb. There affects of the bombs are still there today.

Clearly Harry Truman would not have understood that a large dose of radiation to someone can increase the risk of their grandchild having leukaemia. A child who dies of leukaemia in 2016 may well be an indirect victim of the a bombs. (It's impossible to prove especially as there is radiation from the more recent disaster of Fukeoshima nuclear power station.)

Great post Di.

Interesting how we view things now. The Germans and Japan had the right to defend themselves?

My grandfather would have welcomed his Japanese "friends" to explain why they treated him like they did

Why does everything have to be compared to the holocaust? I honestly think doing this diminishes the holocaust and is a lazy way of looking at whatever atrocity you are examining.

There is an implied thing of "we all have to keep acknowledging the wrongs of the jews but what about the (fill in as needed)" Why can't we acknowledge the holocaust as a unique evil in the world and then go on to examine whatever else separately.

I have grave doubts about whether the atomic bomb should have been dropped and feel it was absolutely wrong

but I do that acknowledging that Japanese military culture was horrendous - you do know what brought America into the war? The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war- read about that and how those sailors died. read about the Rape of Nanking earlier in the 20th century, kamikazi pilots, the comfort women still being denied by the Japanese governments, what happened the prisoners of war, Burma etc.

None of that justifies dropping a nuclear bomb on civilians but it certainly means it is not right to compare imprisoning and slaughtering your own citizens (also known as the holocaust) to bombing a country that declared war on you (after bombing your navy first), that was still fighting hard and refusing to surrender.

I know people whose fathers were in the Pacific theatre and would probably not be all

Do you feel the same about the bombing of Dresden?

Anyone comparing the bombing of a city, nuclear or otherwise, to genocide does not understand what genocide is.

The Jews did nothing wrong. Neither did the civilian population of Japan. Unlike Germany the Japanese did not vote for their emperor. I think you forget that 144,000 people were killed by the two bombs and many more people died later from cancers caused by the bombs.

Holding disportionate or spurious grudges against entire populations is often the basis for genocide. In the 16th century a minority of Jews lent money at high rates of interest. Clearly this is not a justification for murdering millions of innocent people hundreds of years later. Another trick is propaganda to make your target seem less than human. For example cartoons of very yellow people with slitty eyes.

Two wrongs do not make a right. The treatment of Japanese POWs is not a reason to murder two cities. Out of interest do you think the POWs in Nagasaki were more innocent than the Japanese children caught up in the bomb?

The houlcaust is not a unique evil. Pretending that genocide does not happen or has not happened helps no one. We ignore the plight of gay people in Syria and Iran at our peril.

The houlcaust is not a unique evil.

Well there you have it. I happen to think it is. Most evils are and trying to reduce them all to one common denominator of "evil" is very very dangerous.

You could easily have started this thread asking if people agreed that dropping the atomic bombs in Japan was horrendous and unjustified. An interesting discussion might have ensued.

But mentioning the holocaust is just a way of minimising one atrocity without adding anything to the understanding of the one under discussion. Why the need to compare to the holocaust at all? Why the need to point out what 16th century jews did for a living - as if this is some sort of an explanation for the holocaust?

I also don't think you know what genocide means. By your logic, presumably you think the bombing of Dresden was also a genocide?

yabu
It shortened the war in the Far East by 2 years and avoided a land invasion of Japan which would have killed far more people
It was the only way to end the war.
Sad for the innocent people but they were just collateral damage really.

It's questionable whether it did actually materially shorten the war though. That was always the story I was taught but recently it's increasingly been suggested the Japanese were on the verge of surrender anyway and the bombs were motivated by a need to show the Soviets what the US had.

I agree you can't compare evils though. As with Dresden it may or may not have officially been a war crime but there is no scale on which you can measure evil.

Yep war is bloody stupid, there are no 'good' guys, only winners and losers.

Really I refer you to George Macdonald Fraser's memoir of the war in Burma, "Quartered Safe Out Here". Fraser was still fighting the Japanese when he & his unit learned about the bomb. His discussion of it & the reasons for & against its use is both eloquent & instructive.

canyou mentions kamikaze pilots. Do you think they were materially different to, say, the Dambusters, who knew their chances of coming back from the raid were minimal, but went anyway? Is it that the kamikaze pilot has no chance at all of coming back, that their death is essential to the success of their mission?

Records from Japan's military council show that they did not surrender because of two bombs, but only because the speed at which the two bombs were dropped convinved them that the US had more.

After Hiroshima the high command believed that civilian morale could sustain 1 equivalent bombing a month and would still be able to resist an invasion. They didn't consider surrender until Nagasaki.

The atomic bombings weren't genocide: The intent wasn't ethnic extermination. It was pure military strategy: The application of force to assert a political outcome. The Holocaust was pure genocide: ethnic extermination to no political or military purpose. The two are incomparable in both scale, motive and outcome.

i dont think the holocaust is the only genocide in history but why are you comparing nuclear bombing of 2 cities to any genocide at all???

are you thinking genocide means 'kill a lot of people'?

it doesnt!

Everybody committed war crimes - look at how the Japanese treated the defenceless women and children in Nanjing, or the fire bombing of Dresden, or the siege of Leningrad, or the Russian invasion of Berlin, of thd concentration camps.

It was total war from everybody and everybody involved accepted as normal circumstances which in hindsight are shocking. Eg Churchill planned to release mustard gas on British beaches if the Germans invaded despite Geneva protocol etc.

I wouldn't compare it to the holocaust but I do think it was a terrible thing to do. Over 200,000 innocent people killed :( children dying from radiation poisoning. No, I can't think of that as 'collateral damage'.

So what do you think the Americans should have done?

I think the bomb was dropped because of the horrific American casualties from the war in the pacific. It’s alright saying that germans were equally keen to defend their homeland but the Japanese genuinely fought to the death when attacked. Very few prisoners were taken because the Japanese never surrendered. Truman looked at the cost of hundreds of beach landings plus an attack on the main land where the population density was so great that even with a few fanatics every square mile would have cost hundreds of lives and made the decision. I think I read somewhere that the estimated American casualties of an attack on the mainland japan was getting near to a million.

I suspect that the Americans would probably have killed a lot more civilians in that attack than the 100-200,000 that Hiroshima cost them.

I don’t like what happened but I suspect the decision was made to shorten the war and it did. Probably by a couple of years.

Did Jewish people launch a massive attack on the Germans? Had they invaded their neighbouring countries, rampaging through the cities? Had they ignored all rules on POWs, torturing them, starving and executing them? Had they turned invaded countries women into comfort women- prostitutes?
I must have missed all this.

It's so easy to view this through modern eyes. The world was a completely different place back then. I believe that thousands if not millions more would have died if they hadn't dropped the A bombs. That doesn't mean that I like bombs and civilian casualties, but the Japanese were not an enemy you wanted to launch a ground offensive on. My Dad was in Burma during ww2 and the things he told me were shocking.