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.

The Japanese themselves showed no consideration for innocent women and children - go and Google "The Nanking Massacre".

I guess by "The Japanese" you mean the Japanese military elite, correct?

such is total war. i'm not sure what you want people to say? it was never a question of 'our soldiers fight your soldiers' vs 'we drop a nuclear bomb on civilians'. that just wasnt an option by then. you cant just make it an option retrospectively through wishful thinking.

It's a ridiculous argument. The whole thing.

Lumela absolutely, Browning's work would be another great place to start. Whilst yes they are approaching the topic from opposite structuralist/intentionalist viewpoints their arguments are not as polarised as they first appear. I think Browning is a great historian but even he acknowledged in later essays directly addressing Goldhagen that the police men were 'willing executioners' even if they did not decide to become 'genocidal executioners'.

Metacentric I didn't say the OP's post was grounded in prejudice or ignorance but in a misunderstanding of the word genocide. My statement still stands for many other people who minimise the holocaust.

why are civilian deaths worse than the death or conscripted servicemen?

its a moot point by 1945 imo anyway. conscription of young boys into the ss in the last days of the war, plans by the japanese to mobilise the civilian population into militias in case of invasion, it was all a big, nasty mess by then.

This whole thread is ridiculous, we can't judge previous generations by todays standards. We might as well discuss the use of chariots against foot soldiers.
The debate should be should we kill our enemies? If the answer is yes, it's just a matter of how many.

Japanese women cared little for their children when they threw them off the cliffs in Saipan Island rather than surrender. They were more concerned with the honour of the emporer than their own kids. All the children who died when the bombs were dropped would have died anyway had the American had to fight a land battle on the mainland. Plus millions more.

Goodbyetoallofthat:
You seem certain that the Japanese military was divorced in its thinking from the civilian population.
I'd be interested in reading your sources for that assumption, please post the references.

TTWK- I don't think that's entirely fair. The people on Saipan generally had not-so-great lives, weren't particularly well treated by their society and were led to believe that American capture would be horrible. They were then promised a better afterlife for their children and themselves if they committed suicide. I'm sure they weren't just chucking their kids off cliffs for the fun of it.

redbinneo I generally assume that a military is a distillation of the nationalist, right-wing segment of any population. I think this is pretty sensible, less so in the case of conscription (I'll confess I have no idea of the Japanese were under conscription).

But still with conscription, you have to consider indoctrination and pacifist defectors.

You cannot compare an attempt to wipe out an entire race with an attempt to wipe out two cities. Both horrific, neither should ever have happened, but not the same.

One resulted in the deaths of around 6m people and involved the collusion of the majority of an entire nation. The other involved the death of less than a million people and involved the collusion of a much smaller number of people. One of the pilots tried to kill himself because of the guilt and never really recovered. Not the same.

it ended the war in japan.

my fil fought in burma it was hell. hindsight is great

I don't think anybody is dismissing the horror of the civilian deaths.

I'm certainly not. I'm just saying that fewer deaths are to be preferred to more. I also think that it's important to see these events in the context of the time, and consider them in the light of the alternatives. Sometimes there are no good choices: one has to select the least worst option.

One resulted in the deaths of around 6m people and involved the collusion of the majority of an entire nation. The other involved the death of less than a million people and involved the collusion of a much smaller number of people.

Do we know that the "majority" of the Germans colluded with the Nazis?

And, what are we to make of the stark contrast between the exceeding well-documented Nazi crimes, but the dearth of criticism to the US with respect to not only Japan but (casting a wider net) the Native American?

Like many others both I and DH would quite probably never been born had the bomb not been dropped. Both our DFs were waiting to invade Malaya/Burma in summer 1945. My DF arrived in Singapore just as the war ended and saw some of the British and Commonwealth POWs soon after release. He was deeply affected by this and this coloured his view of the Japanese for the rest of his life.

Goodbye, I'd hardly say there's a 'dearth of criticism' of the US with regards to Japan.

About the Natives, not so much.

the japanese have never been allowed to have an army since the war have they?

i've watched many a chinese film about what japan did to them in the war. it's bloody awful. the whole world situation at that time was fucked

They were then promised a better afterlife for their children and themselves if they committed suicide. I'm sure they weren't just chucking their kids off cliffs for the fun of it.

The motives are to an extent irrelevant: the children still died. What makes you think that mainland Japan would have seen any fewer children being killed by their parents?

No-one who wrings their metaphorical hands over Hiroshima and Nagasaki appears to have better solutions than the entirely discredited "peace feelers" that Stalin rejected and the war cabinet would never have agreed to; after the Potsdam declaration, Truman and Churchill would have vetoed any such peace even in the amazingly implausible event that it had happened. The western powers had seen enough post-Versailles to know that unconditional surrender was the only reasonable outcome, and what Japan fruitlessly tried to negotiate with Russia was very much not unconditional.

Alternatively, people appear to think a ceasefire in place would be a reasonable end (sucks to be in Singapore, or Java, or Sumatra, but never mind) or that Operation Downfall/Olympic would not have been orders of magnitude more destructive or that allowing Operation Starvation to run its natural course would have been kinder. What else was on the table?

Fuzzywizard, do you think the Americans dropped the bomb for the fun of it? They did it to bring to an end a terrible war against a despicable foe, a war they didn't start and never wanted.

Goodbye yes I think we know that they knew what was happening and the majority did not speak out. I don't judge them for that, they were difficult times and they lived under a very sinister regime, but far more people actively enabled the holocaust to happen. The sheer scale of the two are not remotely comparable.

I'm not defending either. FWIW I get irate at the U.S. Policing who may have nuclear weapons, when they're the only nation to have used them in war. I fully support stopping trident too. I'm just saying that the two are not entirely comparable.

"could wipe us all out if something goes wrong. "
So could the Russians.

TTWK- No I don't. I think actually Harry Truman was a decent man, certainly not in any way comparable to the Nazis. I think he made the decision he did in difficult circumstances and crucially without a full understanding of what the bombs would do. I think it was a bad decision, he used a weapon of immense power against a predominantly civilian target. Even at the time there were calls to detonate it over Tokyo bay where it would be seen by the Japanese but not actually be dropped on people. It was decided for various reasons that the complete destruction of two relatively compact, densely populated cities would send a stronger message and make surrender more likely. There were also some people involved who definitely seemed to be motivated by scientific curiosity- they wanted to see what the bomb would do to people.
There were other, more isolated military targets that they could have chosen too, they didn't. Avoiding civilian casualties just wasn't a priority and that makes it wrong IMO. I don't however think the people who made the decision were evil and, as I said in my first post on this thread, I don't think it can be compared to the holocaust.

Not sure this has been posted yet, but in response to someone near the start of this thread who imagined the pilots had no idea, here's an interview with the pilot of the Enola Gay, who knew exactly what he was doing and had no regrets for the rest of his life about having done it.

But Claude Eatherly certainly did have regrets.