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.

Claude Eatherly certainly did have regrets.

He wasn't there, and didn't see either the explosion or its aftermath. His involvement was incidental: Straight Flush was a weather reconnaissance aircraft running an hour ahead of Enola Gay, and had turned for home long before the bomb was released.

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

I mean the Japanese Army which enjoyed the full and wholehearted support of the civilian population at home. The idea that anyone concerned with dropping either of the 2 A-Bombs has any reason to feel either guilt or shame is totally absurd.

there are innocents, small children, on all sides in a conflict

Not in modern war. The idea of "innocent civilians" died in 1914.

Erm really? You might want to look up the definition of Crimes Against Humanity as followed by the International Criminal Court.

That previous message relates to the definition of innocent civilians...

I think America probably had several reasons for dropping those bombs. To end the war quickly with less loss of life, to see what the bombs could actually do and to flex it's muscles. I do think it must be a bit chilling to think that your country was the one to unleash this all out devastating destruction, so devastating and horrific that no other country has went there since and it became the stuff of nightmares for generations of people who came after. Killing and destruction on that scale should never be so easy or so quick with so little of the destoyers blood on his hands.

I can think all that and still see that it was desperate and unique times - all out ugly modern warfare when winning is all that matters.

Another point the OP is forgetting is that the bomb cost somewhere between 100 and 200,000 civilian lives. An invasion would have cost a lot more innocent civilian lives. Americans wage war with a view of minimum risk to their own troops and always have done. An attack on a village would mean flattening it with artillery and airpower before the attack went in. Civilians die much easier than soldiers do in these attacks.

German civilians weren't killed predominantly by artillery fire, they were killed by Bomber Harris. With artillery you can decide to aim the cannon this way or that way. With carpet bombing, you can really only decide to do it or not to do it.

The Japanese refused to believe that anyone human, much less an inferior race (the Americans) had made such a terrible device that could do so much damage to Hiroshima. Disbelief was rife. Maybe with a few weeks to think about it the Japanese would have come around, but there was huge denial. It took Nagasaki for the Japanese to believe that they had to surrender.

Firebombing of other Japanese cities was ongoing & killing tens of thousands (mostly civilians) at a time.

Remember all those little (not Japanese territory) Pacific places where Japanese soldiers were cut off or defied their commanders & fought to the death for decades after the war. Continued until the 1970s. The west had very good reason to think that nothing but the most huge show of force would bring the war to an end.

Doubtless it has been mentioned somewhere in this thread already, but the Bushido Military Code does have problems with the concept of surrender itself, which is why allied soldiers who did surrender got such an inhuman time.

Erm really? You might want to look up the definition of Crimes Against Humanity as followed by the International Criminal Court.

The fact that the ICC and it's definitions exist is evidence that being an "innocent civilian" is no protection in time of war.

David McCullough in his biography of Truman makes the point that the US Govt. was very worried about what would happen if, having dropped the bombs, the Japanese decided to fight on. They hadn't the resources to build more and a full scale invasion of the Japanese home islands (Operation Downfall) was predicted to cost half a million US casualties of whom 100,000 would be killed.

The decision to drop the bombs has to be seen in the light of this. Plus the intention was never to exterminate the Japanese people, it was to bring about a Japanese surrender at the least cost to the US in terms of killed and wounded. One of the reasons for not having Tokyo as a target was that the Japanese Govt. had to be left alive in order to surrender.

Sorry for posting is dribs and drabs - machine is playing up

Maybe we should leave ICC out of it, time relevance and all that, plus some countries being more exempt than others, etc.

Dora, I didn't say the ICC was relevant to this argument, a pp claimed the idea of innocent civilians died in 1914. The fact the ICC currently have a definition disproves this, read the context.

Sam, I didn't already suggest it was any protection... Just that the concept does exist.

Didn't Leonard Cheshire (as one of the pilots) feel so wracked with guilt it moved him to set up the Leonard Cheshire Homes for disabled people?

...sorry, was referring to earlier posts about pilots having no regrets.

Can I just add that the nuclear weapons killed under 500,000 the Nazi's killed 6 million innocent jewish people.

To compare the two is a massive insult. The invasion of Japan would have resulted in a higher loss of life.

Although the event should never happen again.

This is very informative video.

Leonard Cheshire was an observer at Nagasaki as he was British not American. He had also been in the raid that damaged the V3 weapon site - if that had been operated by the Germans, London could have been obliterated in hours.

Didn't Leonard Cheshire (as one of the pilots)

He wasn't a pilot on these raids, nor anything like it. There was very limited talk early on about using RAF Lancasters to drop the weapons, because they had longer bomb bays. However, it was quickly decided that American weapons would be dropped by American aircraft flown by American crews, and the "Silverplate" B29s were modified to have a long enough bomb bay for both of the types of weapon. He and William Penny flew on Big Stink as British observers of the Nagasaki attack, although for various reasons they were not as close as was intended.

feel so wracked with guilt it moved him to set up the Leonard Cheshire Homes

No. He started the homes for disabled war veterans, and the expansion into disability more widely happened for more contingent reasons.

was referring to earlier posts about pilots having no regrets.

None of the pilots expressed any regret; quite the contrary.

They hadn't the resources to build more

Yes they had. In rough terms, they could have fielded about three weapons a month, mostly Nagasaki-type implosion-assembly Plutonium weapons. There were sufficient assemblies available, and Hanford had the capacity to make Pu239 in sufficient quantities (when the original Thin Man design proved unworkable, it turned out that the replacement Fat Man design needed less Plutonium, so the production facility was over-sized). Uranium for Hiroshima-type gun-assembly devices was in shorter supply, even though the bomb itself is much simpler, and gun-assembly weapons are much more dangerous to transport and deliver, so fewer weapons of that type would have been available.

The next bomb could have been dropped by about August 19, and thereafter about one every ten days. The debate was actually concerned about the likelihood of the third, fourth, fifth and subsequent bombs forcing a surrender if the first and second hadn't, and therefore whether it would be better to hold all the available devices back and use them at the same time, tactically, in support of an invasion force. If you think the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were destructive, consider the use of ten or more devices of a similar scale in a single attack, in the manner of the D Day pre-bombardment.

all out ugly modern warfare when winning is all that matters.
There's actually quite a lot of evidence that the Allies were often anxious to avoid reprisals being visited upon civilians, even when this limited their own operations. I encountered this when interviewing a veteran some years ago - he worked with the SOE and said they tried to make it clear that any behind-the-lines operation had been carried out by Allied troops, to ensure the safety of the civilian population. Exactly the same crops up in W Stanley Moss's 'Ill Met by Moonlight', about the SOE in Crete.

The Japanese were pioneers of genocide and mass rape when they occupied China.
When do you call troops who slaughter doctors, nurses and patients in a hospital?
eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_2014-04-07_090735.html