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.

This thread is a joke.
People are justifying the massacre of Hiroshima by saying

1. It saved the lives of prisoners of war and of starving people in Asia.
2. The Japanese had further plans to continue the war
3. It ended the war quicker.

In my view Hiroshima was the equivalent of the holocaust due to the fact they wiped out an entire city in one fell swoop, Im surprised anyone survived. Anyone justifying otherwise is disgusting.

Also people saying they cant comment as they weren't there are ridiculous I was you weren't present in the Holocaust either. It seems some lives are seen as more precious than others.

In my view Hiroshima was the equivalent of the holocaust due to the fact they wiped out an entire city in one fell swoop

So what would you have done?

Remember, about a million people a month are dying in Japan. So in order to do better than what actually happened, you need a plan that ends the war within weeks. The earliest a ground invasion can be staged is early 1946. Your move.

"some lives are seen as more precious than others"

and who are you talking about there? "the jews"????

I've often thought about this op and almost started a thread yesterday. I don't think the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians can ever be justified. These people were either disintegrated immediately or suffered agonising deaths a few days or a few years later. The sight of the atomic bomb makes my stomach churn. Those saying 'but look at what the Japanese we're doing' do nothing more than argue that two wrongs make it right. Dropping bombs on civilians can never be justified, surely? That's a heck of a lot of 'collateral damage'. And I am well aware of the consequences and personal tragedies on both sides as my grandfather was one of those who liberated Bergen Belsen and my other granddad's brother died building the bridge on the river Kwai.

the op explicitly compares the nuclear bombing of 2 japanese cities to a campaign to deliberately kill every single member of an ethnic group, deliberately including the children so that future generations will not exist to exact revenge.

how can they ever be the same?

But you can't just write off the 'ending the war quicker' like that.

250,000 people died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was estimated that 500,000 allied troops would die in an invasion of Japan and up to 10 (ten!) million Japanese.

Gummy
Anyone justifying otherwise is disgusting.
Oh. Okay. I'm disgusting for wishing to bring down the overall death toll of World War II.
That makes sense. Not.

Seffina
but all I'm saying is that there are going to be secrets somewhere, we can never truly know everything.
Yes, agreed. However, there is a lot of info in the public domain that is not widely circulated, certainly not in the UK. A lot of people can tell you all about Hiroshima, but don't have a clue about the Sook Ching, the romusha and the hell ships. They're 'allowed' to know it, but they don't trouble to find out and no one tells them.

It was wrong but it wasn't genocide. Genocide means wiping out a whole race, the Americans didn't want to annihilate the Japanese race, they wanted to win the war.
Genocide is used a lot when it is not accurate. In this case it would be better to describe it as a war crime, similar to Dresden or Coventry.

Yes I agree on the semantics DrDre. Genocide, no. Wrong (imo), yes.

It seems some lives are seen as more precious than others.

Yes, I wonder what the writer of this means.

Perhaps they meant the murder of approx 6 million Chinese, Indonesians, Fillipinos, Koreans AND many thousands of POW's by the Japanese is completely irrelevant to them.

A lot of people can tell you all about Hiroshima

Although I'm not clear what some of it's based on.

I've been to Hiroshima several times, which is very sobering (I intended to get to Nagasaki a few years ago, but other commitments intervened). I've also been to Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg so I know what the aftermath of conventional firestorms look like too.

The German government may have been irrational, but the German military and the German population were not. When the game was up, they surrendered, and Hitler's Nero Decreee was never enacted.

In the case of Japan, at least half of the war cabinet and all of the military hierarchy were completely irrational, and would have fought to the death, both theirs and others. The population, cowed by the military, could have done nothing to prevent it and - as at Okinawa - mass civilian suicide was highly likely, as well as a long-running guerrilla war. When people talk of Japan being "on its knees", which it was, economically and militarily, they assume that was a prelude to surrender. It wasn't: the Japanese Army would have fought to the last man and the last bullet, no matter how futile the battle. Against opponents like that, death tolls would have been astronomical.

I see what you mean. 'They' (media and/or govt.) tell us what they want us to know would be better phrasing perhaps.

It's interesting though, the general perception of what the war in Japan was all about. I'm trying to think back to history lessons, but our GCSE syllabus skipped over the wars and I can't really remember what I was ever taught about it, but either way there was nowhere near as much detail as the war in Europe, which may be understandable. The vast majority of what I do know about the war in Japan (which isn't that much, admittedly) I have learnt in adulthood.

I'm thinking out loud here, and may be way off the mark, but do our modern perceptions of both the Germans and the Japanese (from a UK pov) perhaps affect our thinking about Hiroshima and the Holocaust?

I'm trying to think back to history lessons, but our GCSE syllabus skipped over the wars and I can't really remember what I was ever taught about it

Mine were taught nothing, which made a trip to Hiroshima the ultimate in "teachable moments" as I had to start from about 1904.

Up until quite recently, Japanese education skipped from about 1920 to 1956, so the Japanese post-war generation themselves knew very little as well. Very few Germans would attempt a victim narrative (there we were, quietly minding our own business, until the nasty British and Americans started a war for no reason at all) but that is a very common thread in Japanese thought (or at least, according to my Japanese colleagues in their fifties).

Lack of knowledge of the background to the war in the East, particularly just how large the Japanese sphere of influence was and how cruel it was, tends to make people of a liberal bent think that the ending of the war was either not necessary (why not let it peter out into a cease fire, which is about the best the much vaunted "negotiations with the Russians" could ever have got, and even that is highly unlikely) or that it was all the American's fault (no, they did pretty well everything possible to avoid a war right up until Pearl Harbour).

There was going to be a war in the East. If we're talking about racist assumptions about the values of life, Japanese doctrine was savagely racist (hence their treatment of PoWs, Koreans, etc). I'm simply not sure what alternative people think there was, or why the non-nuclear ends to WW2 (either starving Japan into the stone age over the course of a couple of years, probably killing upwards of fifty million people, or a land war that could easily have killed twenty million) are preferable to what happened.

Although I'm not clear what some of it's based on.
Ditto, Meta.

I think if people in Europe were better informed about WWII in Asia, they would wonder why Japanese premiers make obeisance at Yasukuni, and understand why, when they do, the Chinese and Koreans get a bit agitated.

I would agree that the atom bombings were 'wrong'. However, at the time, there were absolutely no 'right' options. Consequently, I think they were the lesser of two evils, since the alternative would almost certainly have lead to many, many more lives being lost.

If i'm at war with an aggressive nation who will not follow general guidlines of warfare and who would think nothing if torturing me and my children - then yes, our lives are more important.

Quite, Lumela.

Operation Meetinghouse and Operation Starvation (the firebombing of Tokyo and the programme of mining harbour and interdicting coastal shipping) killed far more people than either of the nuclear strikes, and combined killed more than both. And yet the former is glossed over and the latter is almost unheard of outside people with a deep interest in the topic.

Operation Starvation would have probably ended the war. It would have done so over the course of two years (if you added in a "Transport Plan" style attack on the rail network, probably done by tactical aircraft launched off carriers - programmes to carrier-ise Mosquitos and Hornets were part of this) and left Japan as a stone-age country with a population less than half of that before the war. Quite why this is better than the nuclear strikes is a matter of aesthetics, not morals: presumably starving fifty million people to death is less troubling than killing a quarter of a million people relatively quickly.

Thanks btw, Lumela and Meta this is all very interesting.

No probs, Seffina.
Meta knows much more about Japan than I do, so I'm finding her posts very interesting too.

I had a conversation with a Japanese friend a few years ago. She must now be about 40, and she said that when she was at school she was taught nothing about WWII. She found out about it as she grew up, from magazines and newspapers, and seemed quite disgusted at the attitude of her government towards the whole topic.

I didn't get as far as asking her about Yasukuni, where the Japanese war dead are enshrined - including executed war criminals who are, apparently, just as deserving of respect and worship as other war dead.

I don't think the firebombing of Germany at the end of WW2 was too clever either- we fucking incinerated 2 whole cities basically- don't think it was much worse than Hiroshima in the sheer awfulness of how it killed people

Gummydrops, if your son/husband was being sent into a foreign country thousands of miles from home to die at the hands of a vicious enemy when you knew your government had the capability to end the war without risking his life, I bet you'd have a different view.

You call those like me who justify the bombing as disgusting, but you sound like one of these disgusting people who is happy to to fight a war to the last drop of someone else's son's/husband's blood.

Wow. I can't believe how U OP is.

We commemorated Hiroshima Day every year when I was growing up (in a left-wing family in USA). We used to go on anti-nuke marches outside the local weapons manufacturers & military bases (7 protesters watched over by 5 cops & their 3 dogs). We held very successful fundraisers at our house (advertised in city-wide media) to protest against nuclear weapons & power. My Mom chaired the organising committee for a UN-sponsored festival for peace. She was a pacifist thru & thru.

The Hiroshima marches were in a spirit of 'The world should never be driven to do this again' rather than "What evil bastards they were."

How depressingly polarised the Left Wingers are, this & the thread I started about voting in the Labour Party leadership race. Do Tory & UKIP supporters end up viciously claiming moral high ground with each other like this?

Lots of posts here mention the killing of women and children. Children I get but why is a women's life worth so much more than a man's?

This is a really good data visualisation of WW2 fatalities.
here

You will that by far the highest number of fatalities were Russian.

My grandmother who was bombed out during the war said that by the time the atomic bomb was dropped people just wanted the war to stop. Grief stricken and starving and desperate it just had to stop.
They didn't have the benefit of hindsight.

I don't think the firebombing of Germany at the end of WW2 was too clever either

There's an insightful analysis of it in RV Jones' memoirs.

At the start of the war, the RAF couldn't hit targets to within five miles. The intention was to hit strategic military targets, but with the navigation and aiming technology of 1940 they just couldn't do it. So they switched to area bombing of cities, dressed up with a lot of rather unconvincing theory about morale and manufacturing capacity, just because it was the only sort of bombing the RAF could actually do.

Over the course of the war, a whole host of technologies first meant that planes flying at night could find the rough area of the target reliably (Gee) and later could bomb, even blind bomb, to very high precision (Oboe). New organisational techniques (Pathfinder Force, master bombers, Leonard Chesire and others from 5 Group's low-level marking with borrowed fighter aircraft) meant that the thousand or more tonnes dropped in a single raid by Bomber Command main force could be concentrated into a small area. German radar, which never managed to be centimetric, was jammed to uselessness. Lancasters fitted with more powerful engines could haul six and later ten tonne bomb loads, and Mosquitoes were modified to carry two tonnes of bombs while still being faster than anything the Germans could put up at night (and, by accident, being rather stealthy against radar).

And by day, after catastrophic losses earlier in the war, the US air force really could do precision daylight bombing with Norden sights and long-range fighter escorts. Germany really had no defence, and even the late arrival of the Me262 jet fighter didn't make a strategic difference.

But because of the experience of 1941, this was mostly used to just to urban "dehousing" more effectively, and ended up in the militarily completely pointless raids on Dresden and elsewhere in 1945.

The point Jones makes - and he was at the heart of the air intelligence work - was that given the technology, organisation and air superiority the allies had by late 1944, they should have switched from area bombing to precision bombing of military targets, which they could now actually do. 617 squadron and other 5 group squadrons had been doing something of the sort (the bombings of the V1 and V2 facilities, the Kiel Canal, various bridges) but not on a large scale. Had people realised just how "good" the RAF had got at precision bombing, they would have done some precision bombing. But as it had crept up on commanders over four years, they hadn't realised what the RAF could have done.

Dresden is shocking because of the scale of the damage, but also the speed (the whole bombload of main force was dropped in a couple of minutes after the target was marked) and the low loss rate of the allies (a couple of planes were lost because bombs were dropped on them by planes flying higher, plus a couple that strayed from the main stream were intercepted by nightfighters on the way to or from, but I think the loss rate was below 1%). It was completely militarily and strategically futile, but executed (I use the word advisedly) with astounding capability and efficiency. That was a complete failure of military analysis: the war would have ended six months earlier had that capacity been used on fuel, ammunition and transport targets.

I think we are so used to having instant information and analysis. So used to living in a reliable cushioned environment that it's difficult to understand the decisions that were made. And with hindsight some were undoubtedly bad.

My grandfather was torpedoed just off the Azores and rescued because he was one of the few who could swim.
I asked him where he'd been headed and he had no idea. "The war was chaotic, people just didn't know what was happening," he said.