International Hiroshima was NOT a mistake

[Poon Goon]

A demonstration with a forewarning was suggested at the time, but they only had enough fissile material for two bombs. Staging a demonstration would waste what fissile material they had on hand. Also, the bombs were intricate devices and any opposition by the Japanese air defenses could cause the device to not work properly. It was also thought at the time that a purely technical demonstration would not cause the Japanese to surrender.

Why couldn't we just email them a video of the test from Alamogordo or at least post it on youtube so they could see what was up?

 

[avenue94]

Truman's own capacity and public statements directly contradict the records of the Target Committee and the Interim Committee about any attempt to select a primarily military target and "minimise civilian casualties".

There never was a serious consideration of this. The US strategy to defeat Japan was to deliver shocks to their leadership structure, and atomic bomb fit the glove perfectly.

Whether you decide Truman was lying or just ignorant and didn't read their reports, that's simply not what happened in the selection process.

I was lean toward ignorance and wartime secrecy, but that does not absolve a leader of their decisions. It would have been unheard of for Truman to veto a list of military targets for bombing as a civilian commander in chief, that really only comes later in history as civil-military relations involve.

They knew what they were doing.

I agree, I would however put it in the context of what US strategy was. It's not a moral excuse, but it helps people understand why events unfolded the way they did.

 

[avenue94]

They could have surrendered after the 1st bomb was dropped, and they didn't.

The 2nd bomb is on them, at worst.

So the thing is that the Japanese may have actually surrendered in a day or two, they were in deliberations and the gap between the two bombings was barely enough time for Japanese command to investigate and understand the event. Similarly, Truman didn't know about Nagasaki until after it happened and was completely blindsided. But weather and military command structures forced events.

Effectively, the US was very surprised that Japan surrendered at that very moment, they had expected to still invade and continue using atomic bombs. A comedy of very dark errors in some respects.

 

[My Spot]

Japan as I understand it would never surrender they would rather die or that was the mentality. I hate saying dropping the bomb was better for Japan but maybe it was . The devastation was localized and the main cities Tokyo and Osaka were left alone. Had a large scale invasion happened the loss of life would have been insane on both sides. Aucks the bomb was ever used but it likely helped both sides here on bigger picture.

They were using child soldiers and forcing women at gunpoint to run at marines and soldiers while strapped with dynamite at that point, it's incredibly naive to think they wouldn't have done the same things during an invasion of the main island.

 

[Ruprecht]

There never was a serious consideration of this. The US strategy to defeat Japan was to deliver shocks to their leadership structure, and atomic bomb fit the glove perfectly.

I was lean toward ignorance and wartime secrecy, but that does not absolve a leader of their decisions. It would have been unheard of for Truman to veto a list of military targets for bombing as a civilian commander in chief, that really only comes later in history as civil-military relations involve.

I agree, I would however put it in the context of what US strategy was. It's not a moral excuse, but it helps people understand why events unfolded the way they did.

They knew they were bullshitting though. At the very least Truman and Stimson knew they were grossly inflating the numbers given as casualty and mortality estimates for a US invasion of Japan, and it was a very self serving justification of targeting civilians, which hadn't previously been a consideration during the war.
Also it seems that the administration were concerned about the indiscriminate use of nukes on civilians being lumped in with the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Hence censorship of reports on the effects of radiation from Japan, and the declaration of reports to the contrary as "propaganda", along with the extent to which Groves would bullshit about radiation to congress. It's weird that people would continue to take the "saving lives" part at face value given how patently false the other aspects of these statements were shown to be (as well as records that show Groves knew he was bullshitting). "Want to believe" I guess.

When Senator Warren Austin (R-VT) asked Groves if there was any radioactive “residue” at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Groves ignored Warren’s report with a definitive answer: “there is none. That is a very positive ‘none.’” While the Senators did not believe there was anything morally wrong about the radioactive effects, Sen. Richard Russell (D-GA) observed that there was “tremendous fear” in the United States of atomic energy and its use, which made him want to know more. On radioactivity and the bombings generally, Groves said that he saw no choice between inflicting radioactivity on a “few Japanese” and saving “10 times as many American lives.” He claimed that no one suffered radiation injury “excepting at the time that the bomb actually went off, and that is an instantaneous damage.”

Groves continued to go out on a limb by declaring that it “really would take an accident for … the average person, within the range of the bomb to be killed by radioactive effects.” Going further out on a limb, Groves stated that the victims of radiation whose exposure was not enough to kill them instantly would die “without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”

 

[avenue94]

They knew they were bullshitting though. At the very least Truman and Stimson knew they were grossly inflating the numbers given as casualty and mortality estimates for a US invasion of Japan, and it was a very self serving justification of targeting civilians, which hadn't previously been a consideration during the war.

So there's some stuff to unpack here and I think we can boil it down to a couple of points.
1. The primary consideration of US planners was reducing US military casualties, not Japanese casualties. The latter is historical retconning.
2. The atomic bombs did save US lives, and they worked as intended to shorten the war (the US didn't know it would take only 2 bombings to cause a surrender, that's historical retconning as well).
3. Even though a lot of the US casualty estimates for the invasion are, let's say, extremely pessimistic, Downfall would have been very bloody with casualties easily in the hundreds of thousands for the Allies.
4. In hindsight, there is a credible case to make that the bombings saved Japanese lives, even though they were not intended to. If Japan had continued to fight for weeks or months (fairly likely), the two outcomes were Allied invasion and/or mass starvation due to the blockade and the US next targeting transportation lines. This is not guaranteed though, as there was a non-zero to decent chance Japan would have surrendered on its own in August.

P.S. I think once again it's very important to emphasize that there was no scenario where the US didn't use atomic bombs. It was never a question of bomb or invade, it was going to be both, including using them in a more tactical military capacity (which would have been very very bad for the Japanese and US troops with how poorly understood radiation was understood in the general population)

 

[GearSolidMetal]

So the thing is that the Japanese may have actually surrendered in a day or two, they were in deliberations and the gap between the two bombings was barely enough time for Japanese command to investigate and understand the event. Similarly, Truman didn't know about Nagasaki until after it happened and was completely blindsided. But weather and military command structures forced events.

Effectively, the US was very surprised that Japan surrendered at that very moment, they had expected to still invade and continue using atomic bombs. A comedy of very dark errors in some respects.

Wait, if it wasn't Truman that gave the order to drop the 2nd bomb, who did?

 

[Brigfa2]

Weebs always talk about how Hiroshima was bad but they never talk about what Japan did to chinese and koreans. Japan was no different than Germany at those time but they get a pass

 

[Fluffernutter]

Watching 'Three Body Problem.' No spoilers:

Big expensive project is going on and one of the characters said something to the effect of 'the last time smart people got in the room and had unlimited funds, they gave us HIROSHIMA!'

As if it's the big bad thing that all of humanity has done. You hear it quite frequently- with all the historical revisionism that's going on- that Hiroshima was some gigantic atrocity. It was not.

WWII was TOTAL WAR. None of us in our times of peace have any idea. And if the situation arose again, where the entire world was in play, are these soft headed historically ignorant people saying that we would not repeat the action to save potentially millions of lives-- even those of the enemy?

It's ridiculous.

An assault on Japan proper would likely have resulted in, depending on who you ask, an additional 3M to 30M casualties. It was the correct choice.

Within the book, Unbreakable, Louis mentioned that in his final move to another POW camp, he was placed on a train.

During this train ride, he could see school children and elderly people learn to "fight" with whatever they had available.

He also noticed that during this trip across the country side, he saw no men in their 20-30s. An entire generation was gone.

He noted that Japan was readying their population for the inevitable invasion by the Americans. But, they were training all civilians to fight back.

If the US (and possibly the Soviets) invaded, millions would have died.

 

[avenue94]

Wait, if it wasn't Truman that gave the order to drop the 2nd bomb, who did?

Local military command essentially. The Nagasaki bombing was a fiasco and the crew almost got court martialed for incompetence. The only orders from Washington given was to start using the atomic bombs, everything else was a tactical decision. Of the rough timeline below, the only time orders from higher up are given are 1 & 8. I'd recommend clicking the link in 1 to understand how vague and permissive the military was with the atomic bombs.

1. "Handy order" from the Army Chief of Staff to the Air Force that the 509 Composite Group "will deliver its first special bomb as as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about August 3" and provides a list of four approved target cities. (Fun Fact: the plan originally was that this order would be only verbal, with no paper trail)
2. After this, there is no more orders from Washington.
3. Hiroshima is bombed because it's the first available target with good weather from that list.
4. Air Force group reconvenes, scientists says next bomb will be ready by Aug 11, Air Force asks for Aug 9 due to approaching weather conditions.
5. Bockscar takes of with the primary target of Kokura, and then almost immediately violates orders by waiting 40 mins for an observer plane that never shows. It then spends almost an hour making multiple attempts to find a break in the haze over Kokura while under AA fire and Japanese fighters are scrambled.
6. Plane decides to shift to secondary target (Nagasaki), and when they get there it's still cloudy. The crew drops the bomb and claims they found a miraculous break in cloud cover, but this is almost certainly a lie to CYA.
7. Bockscar diverts to Iwo Jima due to lack of fuel, lands without permission since fuel is so low that one engine dies on approach.
8. Truman finds out about the bombing, and then issues an order that he must approval any more atomic bombings.

 

[moreorless87]

Read for yourself from sources outside the US. For that matter, directly read the declassified documents released from the targeting committee and interim committee on the decision making process. Even in the US there were contemporary "morons" like Eisenhower, MacArthur, Leahy or McCloy who rejected that justification for targeting civilians or dropping the bombs.
Personally I didn't even realise that "saving lives" was the US myth until someone handed me a Chick Tract about the war as a kid.

Besides the moral consideration I'm guessing they'd perhaps started to pickup that actually inflicting hardship of civilian populations in WW2 was far less effective than it had been in WW1 at creating insatiability.

 

[PhitePhan]

ITT I learned that killing civilians during war is just fine… Im starting to think that Hamas leadership learned a thing or two from the US?

Funny enough, most of the people in this thread justifying the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children in Japan have cited Hamas’ targeting of women and children as the unforgivable sin that justifies Israel killing thousands of women and children in Palestine.

 

[Ruprecht]

So there's some stuff to unpack here and I think we can boil it down to a couple of points.
1. The primary consideration of US planners was reducing US military casualties, not Japanese casualties. The latter is historical retconning.
2. The atomic bombs did save US lives, and they worked as intended to shorten the war (the US didn't know it would take only 2 bombings to cause a surrender, that's historical retconning as well).
3. Even though a lot of the US casualty estimates for the invasion are, let's say, extremely pessimistic, Downfall would have been very bloody with casualties easily in the hundreds of thousands for the Allies.
4. In hindsight, there is a credible case to make that the bombings saved Japanese lives, even though they were not intended to. If Japan had continued to fight for weeks or months (fairly likely), the two outcomes were Allied invasion and/or mass starvation due to the blockade and the US next targeting transportation lines. This is not guaranteed though, as there was a non-zero to decent chance Japan would have surrendered on its own in August.

P.S. I think once again it's very important to emphasize that there was no scenario where the US didn't use atomic bombs. It was never a question of bomb or invade, it was going to be both, including using them in a more tactical military capacity (which would have been very very bad for the Japanese and US troops with how poorly understood radiation was understood in the general population)

Reducing US military casualties wasn't the primary political consideration of the US planners though. Judged on the basis of their own decision making records.
The primary consideration was the degree to which it would speed up the conclusion of the war, with the reductions of casualties a corollary of that.

Despite relative ignorance of Japanese discussions, there were already dissenters within the bodies responsible that thought the bombing unnecessary, even from the perspective of forcing immediate surrender. Including Ralph Bard. Although most only made public objections after the fact.

Ancillary reasons given for using the nukes were both the money invested in the Manhattan project and the demonstration of power.

There's no legitimate argument that the decision to nuke the Japanese civilians was about saving Japanese lives. However in terms of hypothetical scenarios, it's no less probable that nuking actual military targets instead of civilian targets would have prompted surrender. It's a false dichotomy to suggest it was only a choice of indiscriminately targeting civilians for nuclear terror bombing, or an invasion.

My main point though, is that ethical judgement on the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has implicitly been made by the signatories of the '77 amendment to the Geneva convention, with Protocol 1. Indiscriminate targeting of civilians for terror bombing with weapons of mass destruction is now pretty unequivocably considered immoral and unethical. With, "they started it" and "it'll let us end the war faster and with less loss of our soldiers lives" not really being considered serious ethical arguments or moral positions to the contrary.
This wasn't in fact a sudden change of public opinions or morality, and the "saving lives" rhetoric was the defensive construction of the administration responsible in the face of criticism. Which included the exaggeration of the estimated casualties of the invasion, the creation of the false dichotomy of invasion or nuking civilians and the simultaneous downplaying of the effects of radiation and how awful it was to nuke civilians.
This justification became the American myth of nuking civilians to save lives.

 

[Mike Hagger]

Obviously a lot easier to cast judgements in 2024 when no one has legitimate skin in the game. We do know one thing, the bombs ended the war immediately. I can assume another, if Thurman doesn’t use the bombs his political career is absolutely over. A final assumption, none of those people who eventually disagreed with the use of nukes did not celebrate the end of the war. Take it as you want but your hindsight judgment of history is bullshit.

 

[nixkid]

Option A: Lots of Americans and lots of civilians die
Option B: Lots of civilians die

That's not exactly an easy decision. It's a moral dilemma.

Because civilian lives and combatant lives aren't treated the same under modern war doctrine. American soldiers have certainly died in Iraq and Afghanistan because of military rules of engagement designed to limit civilian causalities.

And I'm sure there was a military planner or two who argued that totally unshackling the military would have allowed the them to quickly put down any insurgency and that would have resulted in few overall civilian causalities than 15 years of quagmire. And maybe that would have been the case. But it's a slippery slope and you can take that road down some really dark paths (don't have a bomb? Why not allow your soldiers to pillage and massacre entire towns with total surrender being the condition to end the brutality. Is that justified if it ends a war faster and saves lives?)

 

[fungi]

It was not a mistake.

It was a crime against humanity.

 

[Mike Hagger]

Why not allow your soldiers to pillage and massacre entire towns with total surrender being the condition to end the brutality. Is that justified if it ends a war faster and saves lives?)

That’s what the Japanese did in China. Not only was it allowed but ordered. I’d hazard a guess that method of war you describe was the norm until just a few hundred years ago. Now Americans apologize for their acts. Another 15 years from now maybe we’ll pay the families too for our villainous actions (supposing the US hasn’t done so already).

 

[Joe_Armstrong]

I learned recently US controlled the Japanese economy for decades after.
Didn't know US had so much influence in Japan

 

[DanSavage]

Not for the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki they weren't. Another myth.

You probably replied as I was updating my post to include this info.

Correct. The main one being that they didn't want the mission to fail if the bomb(s) didn't detonate.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't on the list of cities being firebombed so the military could get an accurate damage assessment.

 

[Cherry Brigand]

ITT I learned that killing civilians during war is just fine… Im starting to think that Hamas leadership learned a thing or two from the US?

Funny enough, most of the people in this thread justifying the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children in Japan have cited Hamas’ targeting of women and children as the unforgivable sin that justifies Israel killing thousands of women and children in Palestine.

Context. Do you understand it?