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.

On

Yes, if only that kind of all out brutal, fight for survival warfare could be fought politely and fairly.

What? You have 50,000 men armed with rifles and 100 tanks? Ok, i'll send the same as we don't want an unfair fight. Bear in mind we can only have the same number of casualties and legs blown off, rapes and civilian torture and execution.

It gets very messy trying to compare such horrific actions or to justify either on the basis of how individuals were treated on either side before. I have enormous feeling for those mistreated as POWs by the japanese and have read and heard terrible accounts of this, but I still struggle to see the justification that brings for burning children and others alive with a nuclear bomb. It was and still is heartbreaking.

The reason it gets so messy is Fahd we then start to serve arguments that the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay (those never actually officially accused or tried for anything) justifies some of the atrocities we have seen carried out against western civilians or military in the Middle East since. Or of course vice versa. And we can quickly then lose touch with why so many fought in WW2 - to preserve basic humanity and to protect others.

Who implied it? I haven't seen anyone on this thread suggest that at all.

Harry Truman did not give Japan a chance to respond and surrender before dropping the second bomb.

Yes he did. The Japanese War Cabinet was unable to meet because one of its members had "more important business" elsewhere, and therefore did not respond. When the cabinet finally convened arrival of the news of the bombing of Nagasaki did not alter their deliberations.

A group of young Japanese historians (young in then 1960s that is) called The Pacific War Research Group had access to such of the seniors who were still alive and to such papers as survived. Their book, Japan's Longest Day, documents the attempted military coup that the army launched to prevent the post-Nagasaki surrender. Its findings have never been seriously questioned; it makes it quite clear that it was only the impact of Nagasaki on Hirohito that led to a surrender, and it demolishes utterly the "negotiating with Russia for an orderly surrender"; even had Stalin (Stalin!) been willing to agree to this, the same problem of getting support in the war cabinet would have arisen.

Estimates on the cost of lives of the war continuing are hard to make, because it could have taken many paths. However, deaths from starvation in Japan were accelerating (not least because of Operation Starvation, the mining of harbours and coastal waters) and would have accelerated still more once the US had been in a position to interdict road and rail bridges, in the manner of the Transportation Plan in France. Conservative estimates would have a million a month dying of starvation by the end of 1945: a Hiroshima every four days. The Army had reserves of food, so could, and would, have fought on. Japan would have been reduced to the stone age before it ended, and even then hundreds of thousands of Allied troops (not to mention civilians in Java, Sumatra, Korea) would have died.

Even after Korea, Vietnam and two wars in Iraq, America has not had to make any more Purple Hearts: the stockpile it manufactured for Downfall/Olympic was so large that seventy years later, people given Purple Hearts for wounds in the field are given medals made in 1945.

What Queazy said!

In answer to your question the Japanese began trying to negotiate a peace in July 18th.

Mostly with Stalin. Who wasn't remotely interested.

The terms the Japanese War Cabinet demanded were continuation of the emperor system, the army to disarm itself and remain active in Japan and no war crimes trials. There were also demands for essentially a ceasefire on existing lines, but no-one took that seriously.

Russia invaded Japan anyway, so it was all moot.

All this talk of 'saving millions of lives'

It means 'soldiers who would have been sent to war by the US didn't get killed'.

No, it means Japanese civilians, who were already dying in massive quantities from starvation following the failure of the 1945 Rice Harvest, would have continued to die in even larger quantities.

I don't think we should compare the two, as it minimises either one or the other and they were both totally different.

I also don't believe that we (our generation, anyway) will ever know the full extent of all the horror on all sides of WW2. The public know what we are allowed to know and IME of war veterans, including family, not many of them really talk much about the war. We can use facts and figures and talk about what ifs but lots of bad shit happened to lots of innocent people on all sides, and I know that sounds pathetic but I don't feel any words I can use can really sum up just how terrible it must have been for all those involved.

"It means 'soldiers who would have been sent to war by the US didn't get killed'."

I imagine if they were your soldiers, your husband and sons etc - then that's not such a bad thing. To bring an end to the war and suffering earlier rather than later and even possibly with a lot less loss of life than if the war had continued. Especially if that country had bombed you and declared war first.

they would never have dropped the bomb on a European country.

There was uproar in the Manhattan project when Germany surrendered, to the point of resignations. The view amongst many of the physicists (who were disproportionately Jewish and/or German emigres, and the original physics of a usable, deliverable weapon come from Frisch and Pierlis's memo, who were both) was that they were building a weapon to defeat Hitler, and didn't see that it was necessary to continue their work once that threat was over.

Had D Day failed, the second world war ends with a nuclear strike on Berlin. Why do you think an airforce which had perfected the deliberate construction of firestorms (Dresden was hardly unique in nature, even if it was in scale, and the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 was equally devastating) would cavil over nuclear weapons? There's a good argument to be made that airpower was misused after autumn 1944 in increasingly destructive "area" (but really precision) bombing, and the aiming technology and air superiority that made Dresden happen could have been switched to destroying oil and other energy plants to bring the war to and end. But moral qualms were not on the table.

There was a racist element to the war in the East, and the Japanese were portrayed as sub-human in Allied propaganda. But by 1945, a nuclear strike on Berlin would have been just as acceptable as one on Japan.

My grandpa fought the Japanese and his brother was a POW. My grandpa never spoke about the war until the day before he died (he died unexpectedly through the night) which seemed strange as if he knew what was about to happen to him. My great uncle was badly injured in the camp, he was an officer so he took lashes for his men if they were too weak etc. I can't comment on the bombing, none of us can we were not there but it does seem excessive even if it did end the war.

I want rid of trident because it costs a fortune and could wipe us all out if something goes wrong. We don't even have any of the activation codes because we effectively rent it the U.S. has the codes so we can't actually use it it's useless.

Of course it was wrong, Truman was on his way back from Potsdam when he gave the order, knowing full well it would land on civilians and knowing that he would not have got the support for the act from those at Potsdam.

One wonders about the practice bomb runs that were happening in Pearl Harbour. Had the Americans not ignored them, despite the fact that they were daily, things may have been different. That and the communication cock ups if indeed they were, making war inevitable; it does look like America wanted this war.

The estimate is that an invasion of Japan could have led to up to 10 million Japanese casualties. The Japanese also had a last ditch plan 'Operation cherry blossoms at night' to bomb San Diego with plague bombs - chemical warfare such as they had already used to such devastating effect in China. This was intended to dissuade the Americans from invading and was planned for late September 1945.

The massacre of allied troops, had they invaded the Japanese mainland would have been enormous. Imagine your the president; could you justify 500,000 wounded if you had access to a weapon so powerful it could end a war?

The Americans produced so many purple hearts for the war effort during WWII, expecting an invasion of Japan they still give them out now.

I have to admit, that if there is any truth to the rumour that Truman dropped the bombs to show the Russians his might, then the acts were even more despicable than they're normally portrayed as.

The Japanese also had a last ditch plan 'Operation cherry blossoms at night' to bomb San Diego with plague bombs

"The Japanese" didn't, it was the personal hobby horse of the head of the biological warfare unit. Japan simply didn't have the capability to do it, and the IJN vetoed the idea as impractical. They needed the long-range submarines for other tasks, only three of them were complete and of those, none had actually made a significant voyage. Had the 400-class submarines been usable, missions with higher priority were firstly an attack on the Panama Canal lock gates and once that ceased to be strategically useful later plans were for an attack on Ulithi Atoll (a big US air base in the Carolina Islands).

MrsDevere - Because it was different and desperate times and i think that us sitting safe in modern UK discussing it have no clue or any idea what we would have thought back then or how we would have acted under some of the circumstances that those who were there had to deal with.

it is an interesting discussion though and obviously should be discussed and not forgotten or learned from.

Take a look at the Nanking Massacre where the Japanese slaughtered up to 300,000 Chinese in 6 weeks in 1937. That's a bit more like what the Nazis did.

And most sides would have loved to have been the one to have developed that technology and have that power. Selfishly and with outcome in mind, probably better that the US got their first. I wish thise bombs hadn't been dropped on civillians but they were and i honestly don't know from reading hypothetical outcomes here on how many more would have died etc if they hadn't - if it was the least damaging option.

YABU

I haven't RTFT so I may well say things that have been said already. I agree that the atom bombings were horrific, but:

1. The Jews, as a single group, were not combatants (though, clearly, individual Jews fought in the armies of several countries). The Japanese, as a nation were combatants. It's totally unreasonable to compare the atom bombings with the Holocaust.
2. Hiroshima was the location of least one major army HQ and had (iirc) a lot of ammo factories. Nagasaki was an important port. On that basis, they were reasonable targets.
3. It's worth mentioning that orders had been issued by the Japanese high command that, if the Allies set foot on the Japanese mainland, ALL POWs and internees were to be killed. The swift end to the war saved their lives. There were probably somewhere around 250k of them surviving (25% of British POWs died in captivity; I'm not sure what the % was for internees).
4. There was serious hunger/malnutrition across Asia: people were dying of hunger in the streets of Singapore. The end of the war meant that relief efforts could be started to feed the starving. Had the war continued, those under Japanese occupation would have continued to starve and die.

Knowing, as the Allies did by then, what was going in Japanese-occupied Asia, and knowing, as they also did, of the conditions under which POWs were being held, and knowing from prior experience that there would be huge casualties on both sides (including of Japanese civilians), they took what must have seemed like the most reasonable decision at the time. I'm bloody glad I didn't have to make it, and I am not going to paint as genocidal devils those who did.

Seffina
The public know what we are allowed to know
Well, that's BX, frankly. If you want to know more you go a-digging. The National Archives, the Imperial War Museum - there's masses there that 'the public' doesn't know, but which is openly available. There's nothing to stop you finding it out, writing an article, posting it on a blog.

Well I'd include things that are openly available as things we are allowed to know, but all I'm saying is that there are going to be secrets somewhere, we can never truly know everything.