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Hiroshima (1946)

173 points by canjobear 10y ago

dmfdmf 10y ago
I have no problem with America bombing Japan with nuclear weapons. They (and Germany) deserved what they got, they started a world war and we finished it. All this American angst and apologia is coming from the anti-American intellectuals in the US. They have been spreading their propaganda unopposed for decades. The US is NOT GUILTY and owes no apologies whatsoever, Obama's pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan notwithstanding. For all you rationalists who like thought experiments (pretentiously called gedanken experiments by the same intellectuals); imagine what the world would be like if Germany and the Japanese had won WWII.
- dannypgh 10y ago
  Hitler offed himself and Germany surrendered months before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Your thought experiment has no bearing on reality because Germany had already long lost the war.
- krapp 10y ago
  You're accusing others of propaganda while trotting out the old right-wing hobbyhorses of "anti-American intellectualism" and Obama apologizing for American foreign policy. Your claim that he's making a "pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan," despite the White House having stated clearly that he doesn't intend to apologize for the bombings when the visits Hiroshoma, is itself propaganda. As has been mentioned elsewhere, Germany and Japan were both incapable of winning anything when the bombs were dropped (Germany had surrendered, and Japan was wrecked,) so the outcome where they won WWII if the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped simply couldn't exist.
  - dmfdmf 10y ago
    Do you mean the same anti-intellectual "right-wing" who thinks the USA should be a faith-based, Christian nation? You have me confused with somebody else and need to consider the fact that both the left and right are wrong.
    - krapp 10y ago
      I do consider them both wrong, but it's nevertheless the case that the bogeymen of "anti-American intellectuals" and Obama's international "apologies" have been props of the right for years. If you don't share their views, maybe don't repeat their arguments or prop up their strawmen.
      - dmfdmf 10y ago
        So if the Right says the sun rises in the East should I repudiate that because they say it too? The American intellectuals hate America and blame America regardless of the context. That is a fact and if you are honest you can discover that fact for your self. At least we can agree to agree, the Left and Right are a false alternative offered to the American people.
        krapp 10y ago
        I tend to disagree with people who insist on political absolutes. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
        dmfdmf 10y ago
        > Only a Sith deals in absolutes. Isn't this an absolute? So you tend to disagree with yourself or do you make exceptions for self-contradiction?
        krapp 10y ago
        It was a joke, but to be honest, I always make exceptions for self-contradiction and the possibility that I am unaware of my own ignorance. I believe humans are by nature contradictory, we're wired for bias confirmation, not truth. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
        dmfdmf 10y ago
rootbear 10y ago
I read the book version of this essay shortly before visiting Japan. It is strange to stand next to the one preserved ruined building at ground zero and think that there was once an atomic fire storm in that spot.
studentrob 10y ago
Cool. I hope Americans remember this as we consider electing someone who thinks nuclear war is a bargaining tool. "If they do, they do" is not something a President should be saying about other nations engaging in nuclear war. Go mess up someone else's planet, Trump.
sandworm101 10y ago
WWII is falling out of living memory very quickly. It should be of no surprise that it is becoming every more glorified. Europe is shifting dangerously to the right. The US is about to elect a hawk (both of them are hawks). An Asian nation (this time China) is talking expansion, in influence if not in literal territory. The western world is split on the issue of migrants fleeing local conflicts. And everyone talks of tightening boards. All the ducks are lining up nicely for the day we forget the lesson. There is only so much room in Canada.
- homero 10y ago
  Africa is back as a colony of China this time
Aelinsaar 10y ago
It must have been a surreal experience, to walk through the burning remains of your world, without an explanation as to "How".
- slimsag 10y ago
  Even with an explanation to "How", "Why" is the more common question when faced with intentional and extreme tragedy against yourself and loved ones.
  - niels_olson 10y ago
    Having gone through Katrina and been deployed for Fukushima, I assure you, there is plenty of time for the survivors to contemplate all the questions. That is arguably part of the tragedy of survivorship: facing down all the questions, and knowing with cruel certainty there will be time to face them.
    - canjobear 10y ago
      I also went through Katrina and the thing in this piece that reminded me the most of that experience was how people quickly became numb to the horror of their situation and dealt with things practically, one thing after the other. Or alternately became totally nonfunctional.
      - niels_olson 10y ago
        Agreed. Coming from the military though, it was actually somewhat reassuring. It was like going back to my old job: crisis becomes the daily grind.
  - lotharbot 10y ago
    I think the "why" would have been obvious to anyone -- there was an ongoing, active war in which both sides had been bombing each other and killing civilians, and Hiroshima was contributing significant production toward the war effort.
  - 10y ago
mevile 10y ago
> In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed. However I may feel about the bomb having been used, I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took. As for all the civilians and children and other non-combatants, I doubt the tragedy would have been less without the bomb. It's hard for me to reconcile how such an obvious force of destruction could be more desirable than an invasion, and that's probably because it's very hard for me to understand the destruction an invasion creates. An invasion's impact isn't as easy to put into neat pictures and anecdotes as a singular experience that a bomb explosion creates. There's some question if the ramp up of the Soviets on their eastern border had more to do with Japan's surrender than the atomic bombs we dropped. I'm not sure there's a clear answer there.
- hudibras 10y ago
  If the U.S. had instead somehow parachuted in 200,000 troops to Hiroshima, and then lined up and shot to death 100,000 men, women, children, elderly people, hospital patients, etc., and then burned every building down to the ground, would that be okay? What if by doing so it would end the war? Even if there were going to be many U.S. military casualties (which I doubt, although I know this is debatable), that doesn't in any way justify killing civilians. It's a tragedy of World War 2 (and Korea and Vietnam to lesser extents) that our leaders thought this was an appropriate way to fight a war.
  - sukilot 10y ago
    Why do soldiers deserve to die more than civilians? This is not obvious. Soldiers by and large are not enrolled in war by virtue of free choice among competitive options.
    - slededit 10y ago
      Soldiers have the means to defend themselves.
hkjgkjy 10y ago
> However I may feel about the bomb having been used, I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took. I won't apologize for being rude: fuck you. What judgmental and self-centered view. Views like that are reason for americans being hated worldwide. Would it be the same if a nuke dropped in Chicago, or Las Vegas?
- dang 10y ago
  Personal attacks and name-calling are not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of how wrong someone is. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750599 and marked it off-topic.
canjobear 10y ago
It took me about an hour to read this whole thing. If you are like me and find the Hiroshima event fascinating, I highly recommend doing this. The piece follows several people who ended up in a park together the night after the bomb, and hauntingly captures the mood of that night and the horrifying physical details of what people went through. I definitely think I'll remember some images from this article for a while.
- gunnihinn 10y ago
  The article was long ago published as a stand-alone book. I bought and read the book before I ever knew it came from the New Yorker. It's one of the most haunting things I've read, and I guard that book jealously, which is a long-winded way of recommending you find the book and keep it around.
Trombone12 10y ago
The following summary by Alex Wellerstein represents his understanding of the consensus view. Notably the idea that the bombings where carefully motivated by some sort of ethical calculus is not something that historians now believe. From http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us... * It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used. * Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US. * American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power). * Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honour.
unknown2374 10y ago
And the states continue to get away with things like this to this day.
- Zikes 10y ago
  I don't recall the US nuking anybody recently. Did I miss something?
Hondor 10y ago
It's funny how war is always glorious from the point of view of the aggressor and always sad from the point of view of the aggressed (sp?), even when they're the same person! How we feel depends on who's story we're reading at the time. "She had not had an easy time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: “Isawa died an honorable death at Singapore.” " In case you don't know what her husband would have contributed to in Singapore - "between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya ... were rounded up and taken to deserted spots around the island and killed systematically." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapo...
- studentrob 10y ago
  Yes Japan was awful during WW II. That's why the US dropped the bomb. The thing to remember is, (1) how devastating nuclear weapons can be (2) how close the world came to a much larger nuclear holocaust during the cold war period (3) that it's possible for us to forget the past and re-enter such a period (4) that today's nuclear weapons are 1,000x more powerful than the ones that leveled two Japanese cities [1] (5) only nine countries have these weapons, and (6) that it only takes one bad actor to start a worldwide nuclear war [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield#Examples_of_nuclear_weapon_yields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield#Examples_...
- kristopolous 10y ago
  This reminds me of Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn's story when they were doing journalism in East Timor: "Allan suggested we walk to the front of the crowd between the soldiers and the Timorese, because although we knew that the army had committed many massacres, we hoped that we, as foreign journalists, could serve as a shield for the Timorese. Standing with headphones on and microphone and camera out in full view, we went and stood in the middle of the road, looking straight at the approaching troops. Behind us, the crowd was hushed as some Timorese tried to turn away, but they were hemmed in by cemetery walls. The soldiers marched straight up to us. They never broke their stride. We were enveloped by the troops, and when they got a few yards past us, within a dozen yards of the Timorese, they raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once, and they opened fire. The Timorese, in an instant, were down, just torn apart by the bullets. The street was covered with bodies, covered with blood. And the soldiers just kept on coming. They poured in, one rank after another. They leaped over the bodies of those who were down. They were aiming and shooting people in the back. I could see their limbs being torn, their bodies exploding. There was blood spurting out into the air. The pop of the bullets, everywhere. And it was very organized, very systematic. The soldiers did not stop. They just kept on shooting until no one was left standing. A group of soldiers grabbed my microphone and threw me to the ground, kicking and punching me. At that point, Allan threw himself on top of me, protecting me from further injury. The soldiers then used their rifle butts like baseball bats, beating Allan until they fractured his skull. As we sat on the ground, Allan, covered in blood, a group of soldiers lined up and pointed their M-16s at our heads. They had stripped us of all of our equipment. We just kept shouting, "We’re from America!" In the end, they decided not to execute us." Excerpted from http://www.democracynow.org/2006/11/13/amy_goodman_recounts_the_east_timor http://www.democracynow.org/2006/11/13/amy_goodman_recounts_...
ksou32 10y ago
It's very easy to judge past America 60 years from the moment. Say you're about to be shipped out to run up a hill and killed by Japanese machine guns. Wouldn't you prefer Truman use a super weapon to end the war ?
- nihonde 10y ago
  This article was written immediately after the war, and doesn't really pass any judgment. It's one of the greatest works of non-fiction of all time, in my opinion.
- hasenj 10y ago
  I think would much rather my leaders just sign some sort of an armistice agreement rather than annihilate "enemy" civilians. I mean there are ways to end a war without total destruction. And the logic of killing civilians to save soldiers is just .. no comment.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hugh4 10y ago
    >I think would much rather my leaders just sign some sort of an armistice agreement rather than annihilate "enemy" civilians. Great idea! Now, how do we persuade the other side to sign that agreement?
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      You're making the assumption that you -need- the other side to sign an agreement. Japan was completely contained by the US at this point in the war. This was a decision to hasten the end of the war, but did we ever actually leave? We still have bases in Japan. This was about hastening an end with a guarantee that the US would have full control of Japan. Please don't misunderstand me though, Japan needed to be defeated thoroughly, it had acted and performed gross injustices against many people in the world. But these bombs were not necessary.
microcolonel 10y ago
I read through this, revisited some of the images of the aftermath. I don't think I'll be able to eat meat today, my stomach is turning and I feel like I could vomit. It is so painful figuring that this is one of the "better" possible outcomes of the war.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  It's one of the usual outcomes of war in general. Humans have been maiming, burning, torturing, cutting, asphyxiating, and otherwise abusing other humans for all of recorded history. The only difference is that nuclear weapons are industrialised death machines - much more efficient than the usual manual methods.
tiredwired 10y ago
It's ok, everything worked out in the end. US & Japan turned the whole relationship thing around.
- nihonde 10y ago
  Well, that is actually a good point. As President Obama said in anticipation of his historic visit to Hiroshima this year (paraphrasing): the relationship of Japan and the United States should serve as an example of how we can build a lasting peace from bitter enmity. It's also worth noting that President Obama and the G7 will be meeting on Ise Shima, near Japan's most sacred Shinto site, Ise Jingu. It's significant because the most important shrines of Ise Jingu are rebuilt on the site every twenty years. I've visited Ise Jingu a few times, and the incredible craftsmanship of the buildings is jaw-dropping. Every piece of ancient Hinoki cedar used in the buildings is chiseled and sanded to perfection. They've been re-building the shrines every 20 years for almost a thousand years. Among other things, it's a metaphor for this whole conversation about forging a new tradition.
eceppda 10y ago
The US started targeting defenseless civilians in Japan via fire bombing, and the majority of the Japan's cities had already been destroyed by the time they deployed the atomic bombs. The attacks on civilians in Japan were the first examples of what is now standard procedure in the air force, now known as "strategic bombing". Mark Selden, a researcher at Cornell University, wrote an excellent article detailing this: http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html He points out how the attacks on civilians in Dresden, for example, were met with shock by Europeans at the time. But the Americans never reacted as strongly to the same bombings in Japan. Several cities of civilians were destroyed in the Korean War. In Vietnam city bombins and chemical weapons were deployed against civilians. Carpet bombing was the term for targeting civilians in Iraq I. Etc etc etc. It's all basically the same.
- afterburner 10y ago
  This ignores the changes since Iraq War I though. Carpet bombing is no longer standard procedure, because more accurate bombing became a lot cheaper.
  - eceppda 10y ago
    Iraq II re-destroyed Baghdad and destroyed the city center Falluja. An estimated 655,000 civilians were dead by 2006 and another 2,000,000 displaced. The standard procedure of targeting civilians is still the central strategy.
  - kbart 10y ago
    "Carpet bombing is no longer standard procedure" Really? 0. http://cursor.org/stories/casualty_count.htm http://cursor.org/stories/casualty_count.htm 1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/01/afghanistan.terrorism6 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/01/afghanistan.ter... 2. https://warisboring.com/b-52s-in-massive-mid-east-carpet-bombing-exercise-cf9aaa5e06ab#.q1khlkbnx https://warisboring.com/b-52s-in-massive-mid-east-carpet-bom... etc.
partycoder 10y ago
There are many views on the bombing. The difference is that Americans do not hide it. It's controversial, but people know about it. Same with Germans. People know about how the Germans behaved in WW2, they're not proud about it, it's learned in schools, and they do not hide it. Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions. Japanese schools present a revisionist version of history in which all their horrible and brutal war crimes never happened. The Japanese people promote a vision of Japan with a tradition full of honor and virtue. Do they teach their kids that they dropped a bomb carrying the bubonic plague? or the massacre of Nanking? the mass beheadings of people? the sexual slavery? and many other horrible crimes, even targeting kids... probably not. This is the difference.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions. The US, like the rest of the Allied powers, do more than their fair share of actively hiding their crimes during the war years. They also love to gloss over the degree to which, before they saw him as a threat to their existence, the Allied powers actually admired and respected Hitler and even sought to emulate his leadership. I mean, most Americans sure as heck don't know that FDR literally modeled the genocide in Puerto Rico after 'the methods which Hitler used effectively'[0]. Because very few schools actually bother to mention Operation Bootstrap in the first place, let alone acknowledge that that the US forcibly sterilized 40% of Puerto Rican women (on the grounds that they were 'unfit to reproduce'). Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the exception only because the events directly led to the Cold War as we know it[1], and it's kind of hard to understand the next 50 years of world history without understanding that the Cold War was happening. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=3llNN7jmQE4C&pg=PA255&lpg=PA255&dq=%27the+methods+which+hitler+used+effectively%27+allies+of+a+kind&source=bl&ots=4pSLg7kGgE&sig=__41LBUfymnpFdU_RsuGK9PBhjE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi0-oHFh-_MAhUkE1IKHefrBCUQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=%27the%20methods%20which%20hitler%20used%20effectively%27%20allies%20of%20a%20kind&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=3llNN7jmQE4C&pg=PA255&lpg=... [1] Yes, the Cold War would still have happened even if the US had decided not to drop the bomb, but since we did, the bombings became the unforgettable, tangible symbol of the fear that the Cold War was based on.
- doall 10y ago
oska 10y ago
The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did [1] [1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
KamiCrit 10y ago
Wow that was a great read. Really shocking about what to took to survive Hiroshima. The bomb, fires, flooding, radiation sickness.
palerdot 10y ago
The more searing question for me is the argument that the shock created by the atomic bombings has successfully prevented a WW 111. I cannot come to terms with this argument though I slightly tend to agree with it. On the other hand, the bombings were done just to force a japanese surrender, not with a foresighted view of stopping all the horrible future wars in this planet. Also, I'm not sure whether vietnam, gulf wars will be considered under the "world war" category as a lot of them happened after the japanese bombings. Now, I just resign myself that for whatever reason it happened, and let us learn whatever we could from it.

Hiroshima (1946)

173 points by canjobear 10y ago

I have no problem with America bombing Japan with nuclear weapons. They (and Germany) deserved what they got, they started a world war and we finished it. All this American angst and apologia is coming from the anti-American intellectuals in the US. They have been spreading their propaganda unopposed for decades. The US is NOT GUILTY and owes no apologies whatsoever, Obama's pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan notwithstanding. For all you rationalists who like thought experiments (pretentiously called gedanken experiments by the same intellectuals); imagine what the world would be like if Germany and the Japanese had won WWII.

dannypgh 10y ago
Hitler offed himself and Germany surrendered months before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Your thought experiment has no bearing on reality because Germany had already long lost the war.
krapp 10y ago
You're accusing others of propaganda while trotting out the old right-wing hobbyhorses of "anti-American intellectualism" and Obama apologizing for American foreign policy. Your claim that he's making a "pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan," despite the White House having stated clearly that he doesn't intend to apologize for the bombings when the visits Hiroshoma, is itself propaganda. As has been mentioned elsewhere, Germany and Japan were both incapable of winning anything when the bombs were dropped (Germany had surrendered, and Japan was wrecked,) so the outcome where they won WWII if the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped simply couldn't exist.
- dmfdmf 10y ago
  Do you mean the same anti-intellectual "right-wing" who thinks the USA should be a faith-based, Christian nation? You have me confused with somebody else and need to consider the fact that both the left and right are wrong.
  - krapp 10y ago
    I do consider them both wrong, but it's nevertheless the case that the bogeymen of "anti-American intellectuals" and Obama's international "apologies" have been props of the right for years. If you don't share their views, maybe don't repeat their arguments or prop up their strawmen.
    - dmfdmf 10y ago
      So if the Right says the sun rises in the East should I repudiate that because they say it too? The American intellectuals hate America and blame America regardless of the context. That is a fact and if you are honest you can discover that fact for your self. At least we can agree to agree, the Left and Right are a false alternative offered to the American people.
      - krapp 10y ago
        I tend to disagree with people who insist on political absolutes. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
        dmfdmf 10y ago
        > Only a Sith deals in absolutes. Isn't this an absolute? So you tend to disagree with yourself or do you make exceptions for self-contradiction?
        krapp 10y ago
        It was a joke, but to be honest, I always make exceptions for self-contradiction and the possibility that I am unaware of my own ignorance. I believe humans are by nature contradictory, we're wired for bias confirmation, not truth. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
        dmfdmf 10y ago

rootbear 10y ago

I read the book version of this essay shortly before visiting Japan. It is strange to stand next to the one preserved ruined building at ground zero and think that there was once an atomic fire storm in that spot.

studentrob 10y ago

Cool. I hope Americans remember this as we consider electing someone who thinks nuclear war is a bargaining tool. "If they do, they do" is not something a President should be saying about other nations engaging in nuclear war. Go mess up someone else's planet, Trump.

sandworm101 10y ago

WWII is falling out of living memory very quickly. It should be of no surprise that it is becoming every more glorified. Europe is shifting dangerously to the right. The US is about to elect a hawk (both of them are hawks). An Asian nation (this time China) is talking expansion, in influence if not in literal territory. The western world is split on the issue of migrants fleeing local conflicts. And everyone talks of tightening boards. All the ducks are lining up nicely for the day we forget the lesson. There is only so much room in Canada.

homero 10y ago
Africa is back as a colony of China this time

Aelinsaar 10y ago

It must have been a surreal experience, to walk through the burning remains of your world, without an explanation as to "How".

slimsag 10y ago
Even with an explanation to "How", "Why" is the more common question when faced with intentional and extreme tragedy against yourself and loved ones.
- niels_olson 10y ago
  Having gone through Katrina and been deployed for Fukushima, I assure you, there is plenty of time for the survivors to contemplate all the questions. That is arguably part of the tragedy of survivorship: facing down all the questions, and knowing with cruel certainty there will be time to face them.
  - canjobear 10y ago
    I also went through Katrina and the thing in this piece that reminded me the most of that experience was how people quickly became numb to the horror of their situation and dealt with things practically, one thing after the other. Or alternately became totally nonfunctional.
    - niels_olson 10y ago
      Agreed. Coming from the military though, it was actually somewhat reassuring. It was like going back to my old job: crisis becomes the daily grind.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  I think the "why" would have been obvious to anyone -- there was an ongoing, active war in which both sides had been bombing each other and killing civilians, and Hiroshima was contributing significant production toward the war effort.
- 10y ago

mevile 10y ago

> In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed. However I may feel about the bomb having been used, I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took. As for all the civilians and children and other non-combatants, I doubt the tragedy would have been less without the bomb. It's hard for me to reconcile how such an obvious force of destruction could be more desirable than an invasion, and that's probably because it's very hard for me to understand the destruction an invasion creates. An invasion's impact isn't as easy to put into neat pictures and anecdotes as a singular experience that a bomb explosion creates. There's some question if the ramp up of the Soviets on their eastern border had more to do with Japan's surrender than the atomic bombs we dropped. I'm not sure there's a clear answer there.

hudibras 10y ago
If the U.S. had instead somehow parachuted in 200,000 troops to Hiroshima, and then lined up and shot to death 100,000 men, women, children, elderly people, hospital patients, etc., and then burned every building down to the ground, would that be okay? What if by doing so it would end the war? Even if there were going to be many U.S. military casualties (which I doubt, although I know this is debatable), that doesn't in any way justify killing civilians. It's a tragedy of World War 2 (and Korea and Vietnam to lesser extents) that our leaders thought this was an appropriate way to fight a war.
- sukilot 10y ago
  Why do soldiers deserve to die more than civilians? This is not obvious. Soldiers by and large are not enrolled in war by virtue of free choice among competitive options.
  - slededit 10y ago
    Soldiers have the means to defend themselves.

hkjgkjy 10y ago

> However I may feel about the bomb having been used, I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took. I won't apologize for being rude: fuck you. What judgmental and self-centered view. Views like that are reason for americans being hated worldwide. Would it be the same if a nuke dropped in Chicago, or Las Vegas?

dang 10y ago
Personal attacks and name-calling are not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of how wrong someone is. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11750599 and marked it off-topic.

canjobear 10y ago

It took me about an hour to read this whole thing. If you are like me and find the Hiroshima event fascinating, I highly recommend doing this. The piece follows several people who ended up in a park together the night after the bomb, and hauntingly captures the mood of that night and the horrifying physical details of what people went through. I definitely think I'll remember some images from this article for a while.

gunnihinn 10y ago
The article was long ago published as a stand-alone book. I bought and read the book before I ever knew it came from the New Yorker. It's one of the most haunting things I've read, and I guard that book jealously, which is a long-winded way of recommending you find the book and keep it around.

Trombone12 10y ago

The following summary by Alex Wellerstein represents his understanding of the consensus view. Notably the idea that the bombings where carefully motivated by some sort of ethical calculus is not something that historians now believe. From http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us... * It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used. * Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US. * American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power). * Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honour.

unknown2374 10y ago

And the states continue to get away with things like this to this day.

Zikes 10y ago
I don't recall the US nuking anybody recently. Did I miss something?

Hondor 10y ago

It's funny how war is always glorious from the point of view of the aggressor and always sad from the point of view of the aggressed (sp?), even when they're the same person! How we feel depends on who's story we're reading at the time. "She had not had an easy time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: “Isawa died an honorable death at Singapore.” " In case you don't know what her husband would have contributed to in Singapore - "between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya ... were rounded up and taken to deserted spots around the island and killed systematically." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapo...

studentrob 10y ago
Yes Japan was awful during WW II. That's why the US dropped the bomb. The thing to remember is, (1) how devastating nuclear weapons can be (2) how close the world came to a much larger nuclear holocaust during the cold war period (3) that it's possible for us to forget the past and re-enter such a period (4) that today's nuclear weapons are 1,000x more powerful than the ones that leveled two Japanese cities [1] (5) only nine countries have these weapons, and (6) that it only takes one bad actor to start a worldwide nuclear war [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield#Examples_of_nuclear_weapon_yields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield#Examples_...
kristopolous 10y ago
This reminds me of Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn's story when they were doing journalism in East Timor: "Allan suggested we walk to the front of the crowd between the soldiers and the Timorese, because although we knew that the army had committed many massacres, we hoped that we, as foreign journalists, could serve as a shield for the Timorese. Standing with headphones on and microphone and camera out in full view, we went and stood in the middle of the road, looking straight at the approaching troops. Behind us, the crowd was hushed as some Timorese tried to turn away, but they were hemmed in by cemetery walls. The soldiers marched straight up to us. They never broke their stride. We were enveloped by the troops, and when they got a few yards past us, within a dozen yards of the Timorese, they raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once, and they opened fire. The Timorese, in an instant, were down, just torn apart by the bullets. The street was covered with bodies, covered with blood. And the soldiers just kept on coming. They poured in, one rank after another. They leaped over the bodies of those who were down. They were aiming and shooting people in the back. I could see their limbs being torn, their bodies exploding. There was blood spurting out into the air. The pop of the bullets, everywhere. And it was very organized, very systematic. The soldiers did not stop. They just kept on shooting until no one was left standing. A group of soldiers grabbed my microphone and threw me to the ground, kicking and punching me. At that point, Allan threw himself on top of me, protecting me from further injury. The soldiers then used their rifle butts like baseball bats, beating Allan until they fractured his skull. As we sat on the ground, Allan, covered in blood, a group of soldiers lined up and pointed their M-16s at our heads. They had stripped us of all of our equipment. We just kept shouting, "We’re from America!" In the end, they decided not to execute us." Excerpted from http://www.democracynow.org/2006/11/13/amy_goodman_recounts_the_east_timor http://www.democracynow.org/2006/11/13/amy_goodman_recounts_...

ksou32 10y ago

It's very easy to judge past America 60 years from the moment. Say you're about to be shipped out to run up a hill and killed by Japanese machine guns. Wouldn't you prefer Truman use a super weapon to end the war ?

nihonde 10y ago
This article was written immediately after the war, and doesn't really pass any judgment. It's one of the greatest works of non-fiction of all time, in my opinion.
hasenj 10y ago
I think would much rather my leaders just sign some sort of an armistice agreement rather than annihilate "enemy" civilians. I mean there are ways to end a war without total destruction. And the logic of killing civilians to save soldiers is just .. no comment.
- deleted 10y ago
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- hugh4 10y ago
  >I think would much rather my leaders just sign some sort of an armistice agreement rather than annihilate "enemy" civilians. Great idea! Now, how do we persuade the other side to sign that agreement?
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    You're making the assumption that you -need- the other side to sign an agreement. Japan was completely contained by the US at this point in the war. This was a decision to hasten the end of the war, but did we ever actually leave? We still have bases in Japan. This was about hastening an end with a guarantee that the US would have full control of Japan. Please don't misunderstand me though, Japan needed to be defeated thoroughly, it had acted and performed gross injustices against many people in the world. But these bombs were not necessary.

microcolonel 10y ago

I read through this, revisited some of the images of the aftermath. I don't think I'll be able to eat meat today, my stomach is turning and I feel like I could vomit. It is so painful figuring that this is one of the "better" possible outcomes of the war.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
It's one of the usual outcomes of war in general. Humans have been maiming, burning, torturing, cutting, asphyxiating, and otherwise abusing other humans for all of recorded history. The only difference is that nuclear weapons are industrialised death machines - much more efficient than the usual manual methods.

tiredwired 10y ago

It's ok, everything worked out in the end. US & Japan turned the whole relationship thing around.

nihonde 10y ago
Well, that is actually a good point. As President Obama said in anticipation of his historic visit to Hiroshima this year (paraphrasing): the relationship of Japan and the United States should serve as an example of how we can build a lasting peace from bitter enmity. It's also worth noting that President Obama and the G7 will be meeting on Ise Shima, near Japan's most sacred Shinto site, Ise Jingu. It's significant because the most important shrines of Ise Jingu are rebuilt on the site every twenty years. I've visited Ise Jingu a few times, and the incredible craftsmanship of the buildings is jaw-dropping. Every piece of ancient Hinoki cedar used in the buildings is chiseled and sanded to perfection. They've been re-building the shrines every 20 years for almost a thousand years. Among other things, it's a metaphor for this whole conversation about forging a new tradition.

eceppda 10y ago

The US started targeting defenseless civilians in Japan via fire bombing, and the majority of the Japan's cities had already been destroyed by the time they deployed the atomic bombs. The attacks on civilians in Japan were the first examples of what is now standard procedure in the air force, now known as "strategic bombing". Mark Selden, a researcher at Cornell University, wrote an excellent article detailing this: http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html He points out how the attacks on civilians in Dresden, for example, were met with shock by Europeans at the time. But the Americans never reacted as strongly to the same bombings in Japan. Several cities of civilians were destroyed in the Korean War. In Vietnam city bombins and chemical weapons were deployed against civilians. Carpet bombing was the term for targeting civilians in Iraq I. Etc etc etc. It's all basically the same.

afterburner 10y ago
This ignores the changes since Iraq War I though. Carpet bombing is no longer standard procedure, because more accurate bombing became a lot cheaper.
- eceppda 10y ago
  Iraq II re-destroyed Baghdad and destroyed the city center Falluja. An estimated 655,000 civilians were dead by 2006 and another 2,000,000 displaced. The standard procedure of targeting civilians is still the central strategy.
- kbart 10y ago
  "Carpet bombing is no longer standard procedure" Really? 0. http://cursor.org/stories/casualty_count.htm http://cursor.org/stories/casualty_count.htm 1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/01/afghanistan.terrorism6 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/01/afghanistan.ter... 2. https://warisboring.com/b-52s-in-massive-mid-east-carpet-bombing-exercise-cf9aaa5e06ab#.q1khlkbnx https://warisboring.com/b-52s-in-massive-mid-east-carpet-bom... etc.

partycoder 10y ago

There are many views on the bombing. The difference is that Americans do not hide it. It's controversial, but people know about it. Same with Germans. People know about how the Germans behaved in WW2, they're not proud about it, it's learned in schools, and they do not hide it. Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions. Japanese schools present a revisionist version of history in which all their horrible and brutal war crimes never happened. The Japanese people promote a vision of Japan with a tradition full of honor and virtue. Do they teach their kids that they dropped a bomb carrying the bubonic plague? or the massacre of Nanking? the mass beheadings of people? the sexual slavery? and many other horrible crimes, even targeting kids... probably not. This is the difference.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions. The US, like the rest of the Allied powers, do more than their fair share of actively hiding their crimes during the war years. They also love to gloss over the degree to which, before they saw him as a threat to their existence, the Allied powers actually admired and respected Hitler and even sought to emulate his leadership. I mean, most Americans sure as heck don't know that FDR literally modeled the genocide in Puerto Rico after 'the methods which Hitler used effectively'[0]. Because very few schools actually bother to mention Operation Bootstrap in the first place, let alone acknowledge that that the US forcibly sterilized 40% of Puerto Rican women (on the grounds that they were 'unfit to reproduce'). Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the exception only because the events directly led to the Cold War as we know it[1], and it's kind of hard to understand the next 50 years of world history without understanding that the Cold War was happening. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=3llNN7jmQE4C&pg=PA255&lpg=PA255&dq=%27the+methods+which+hitler+used+effectively%27+allies+of+a+kind&source=bl&ots=4pSLg7kGgE&sig=__41LBUfymnpFdU_RsuGK9PBhjE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi0-oHFh-_MAhUkE1IKHefrBCUQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=%27the%20methods%20which%20hitler%20used%20effectively%27%20allies%20of%20a%20kind&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=3llNN7jmQE4C&pg=PA255&lpg=... [1] Yes, the Cold War would still have happened even if the US had decided not to drop the bomb, but since we did, the bombings became the unforgettable, tangible symbol of the fear that the Cold War was based on.
doall 10y ago

oska 10y ago

The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did [1] [1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...

KamiCrit 10y ago

Wow that was a great read. Really shocking about what to took to survive Hiroshima. The bomb, fires, flooding, radiation sickness.

palerdot 10y ago

The more searing question for me is the argument that the shock created by the atomic bombings has successfully prevented a WW 111. I cannot come to terms with this argument though I slightly tend to agree with it. On the other hand, the bombings were done just to force a japanese surrender, not with a foresighted view of stopping all the horrible future wars in this planet. Also, I'm not sure whether vietnam, gulf wars will be considered under the "world war" category as a lot of them happened after the japanese bombings. Now, I just resign myself that for whatever reason it happened, and let us learn whatever we could from it.