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Speak for yourself, you're replying to this thread. Why?
Speaking as a citizen of one of 'em occupied territories by Imperial Japan, I can tell you there's no love lost between my grandparents' generation and the Japanese. Many of them - to this day - have not forgiven the Japanese for what they have done. Frankly, I felt a sense of satisfaction when learning in school that the two A-bombs helped force the Imperial's surrender.
From what little I know, Hiroshima was selected because it was a military depot. It was also one of the few cities not fire-bombed, and had a number of buildings with reinforced concrete structure that - when located far enough away - can withstand a bomb explosion without sustaining damage. Nagasaki was selected because it was a factory center, for military supplies among other things. It had a lot more flammable buildings than Hiroshima. All the more to exacerbate the damage (fan the flames, so to speak) I understand 'Little Boy', and 'Fat Man' as well, were pretty crude designs by today's standards (like only a fraction of nuclear material actually fissioned). Had they been more sophisticated, the damage would be far more horrendous.
I also have no love lost towards those who argued from purely intellectual standpoint all the points against dropping these bombs. It's easy to treat it as a cerebral exercise when you don't have any personal ties to it. I don't hate the Japanese or their culture, but I - along with just about every Southeast Asia citizen of Japanese-occupied territories - was relieved to see the Japanese got what was coming to them. Maybe nuclear attack was extreme, but pain is pain. They finally felt our pain, albeit in the worst possible way. It didn't matter if they were civilians. Many civilians were butchered by Japanese military. Singapore had 3-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation. They not only butchered many innocents, but also damaged the economy with those ridiculous 'Banana' dollars - currency of occupied Japanese territories, but not recognized globally.
Sometimes you got to hit them where it hurts most. When someone commits an atrocity against you or your family, you don't waste time rationalizing with ethics or intellectual discourses. Maybe some of you do. Good luck with that. When civil approaches don't work, then hit them where it hurts. Family, bank account, or whatever they hold dear to their hearts. It's the most effective way to get them to turn around.
I can say from the POV of a Japanese-occupied territory that the butchering and killing of innocents would continue had the Americans not drop the A-bombs.
Post is way too long to read it all...
Simply put, the two nukes dropped saved lives. The third one was going to Tokyo and even if dropped it too would probably have saved lives, if some surviving general somewhere was smart enough to surrender once Tokyo was gone.
The issue of the jet planes is nice, but ignores that by late 45 we were doing our own studies of jets. How many jets could an invaded Japan actually build and fly before the factory was demolished, 10? 30? We had P-47s and P-51s that actually shot down Migs in Korea. Sure they took losses, but every now and then a Mig did go down. Similar attrition would have eaten any Japanese jets. Add to this their lack of skilled veteran combat pilots and the few jets they may have made become much less of a threat. Add to that the question of how well a jet can fly once the fuel depot is bombed into oblivion or over run and they become even less important.
It is also probably safe to presume that once attacked by 6 or 7 year old soldiers a few times, the invading soldiers would adapt a scorched earth invasion policy in which nothing not on their side lived.. We wouldn't be sitting in the fine moral ivory tower we sit in now, but then again those vets wouldn't have wanted to. America would be a totally different (i.e., scarier) place if we had invaded Japan. Probably we would have given part of it to the Soviets and they would have built a wall between the sectors as in Germany. I am pretty confident once a beach head was established lots of countries would have contributed forces so as to claim their own piece of the pie when it was over..
I am not quite able to see what the role of Mao would have emerged as, or if he would have survived Chang Kie Shek. Therefore whether or not Korea and Vietnam would have unfolded as we knew them remains murky..
Instead we demanded surrender, set up a government for them, established a military occupation force (still there, by the way) and now buy TV's and automobiles made in Japan.
One historic footnote that gets curiously overlooked in every "what if we didn't drop the bomb" discussion is that Germany had provided Japan with technology to develop a jet fighter/bomber fleet. Japan was, at most, a couple months away from being able to mass-produce a jet plane fleet that could have annihilated our Pacific fleet and all of our Pacific operating bases that would have been necessary to supply a homeland invasion. Our fighter planes would have been useless against them and nearly powerless to stop them. The Japanese Navy conducted a successful test-flight of the Nakajima J9Y the day after Hiroshima was flattened, which may explain their reluctance to surrender after the first bomb was dropped. If the U.S. military intelligence knew the J9Y was about to come online, I would imagine that was a substantial part of the calculation that eventually led to the decision to drop the bombs to try to bring the war to an end before that could happen.
LOL. They were eating tree roots at the end of the war and had no oil coming into the country and very little steel.
But other than that they could have put up a huge fleet!!
And throughout the month of July, they were talking with the Russians--our "ally"--about surrender...but I guess that wasn't "good enough" for some.
Let's see...
Adm. William D. Leahy..."The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.."
Fleet Adm. Ernest J. King..."I didn't like the atom bomb or any part of it."
General Curtis LeMay..."The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb."
General Douglas McArthur's military judgement was that the bomb had been unnecessary....but he was never consulted either. He believed in using force ONLY against military targets.
General Eisenhower, who also was not consulted, was opposed on the ground that the Japanese were ready to surrender.
But of course, these military leaders didn't know what they were talking about....right?
Leahy was simply wrong about Japanese willingness to surrender, or at least to surrender on terms acceptable to us.
King wanted the Navy to win the victory and it could've but it would've taken longer and cost more lives than the atomic bombs did.
LeMay had a vested interest in the notion of strategic bombing and the creation of an independant air force. He was simply dead wrong. The naval air forces were doing more damage to the Japanese late in the war than the Army Air Force's strategic bombers were.
McArthur lusted for the glory of conquering Japan by invasion.
AND...the Japanese were ALREADY talking about surrender in July...a full MONTH before the bombs were dropped.
Sorry, that dog don't hunt.
I think the dog hunts quite well TK. The Japanese were putting out feelers of surrendering on terms totally unacceptable to us and unacceptable for good reasons.
Read "Retribution" by Hastings for a good account of the whole affair. "Good" meaning one that I agree with.
The whole "Japan was trying to surrender and didn't deserve to be nuked" argument holds a lot more validity if you just take a US-centric view. This is where most of the apologists come from, along with Europe where they tend to know little about that theatre of WW2. As you learn more about the other nations involved, China and many other asian nations in particular, you gain a broader perspective.
The Japanese were averaging a few thousand Chinese civilian deaths DAILY for about 10 years.
TK, I'd really love to introduce you to a number of my Chinese friends and have you sit down and explain why there was no need to force Japan to surrender. I'm curious to hear why you apparently value Japanese lives over Chinese (and other occupied countries like Korea) or is this all new information to you?
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