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>it was just a question of when they surrender and not if You are glossing over this as if it means nothing. The "when" is incredibly important during an activ

>it was just a question of when they surrender and not if You are glossing over this as if it means nothing. The "when" is incredibly important during an active war. Would the "when" be after an American invasion? Taking Okinawa killed 12,500 Americans, 77,000 Japanese military, and at least 100,000 Japanese civilians. That was less than 2 months before the dropping of the atomic bombs. If didn't Japan surrender then, how many more of those battles would it have taken to produce the "when" of a Japanese surrender? How many battles on the Russian side in Manchuria would it have taken? Not only had Japan never surrendered in it's entire 2,000 year plus history, no military unit had surrendered during the entire war. There was organized coup attempted literally the night before the surrender was broadcast and Prime Minister Suzuki, who had survived a different assassination attempt 9 years earlier, only escaped by minutes. Prime Ministers that were not ultranationalist enough had been assassinated in 1921 and 1930, with two former Prime Ministers dying during another coup attempt in 1936. The casual confidence in the outcome of the war is so disconnected from reality that it is laughable. Japanese political surrender, and that surrender being followed by the military was not in any way, some sort of forgone conclusion.

hef19898 3y ago
So? We talk WW2, military casualties were to be expected, weren't they? Just look at Soviet and Russian casualties on the Eastern front. Also, as an alternative to an invasion mainland Japan, cut them of by sea, bomb their cities to dust (still a war crime, but Tokyo was already fire bombed anyway), so basically what happened, atomic bombs or not. And yes, tze end of WW2 was predictable in mid 1944, no doubt about that in any shape or form. The details were up for grabs, sure, the overall outcome was not.
- 542354234235 3y ago
  >military casualties were to be expected, weren't they? First, convenient to ignore the 100,000 civilian deaths. Second, what you are saying is the war was basically won* *After hundreds of thousands of additional military deaths fighting to completely dismantle Japan. >The details were up for grabs Again, these "details" are hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths. You are acting like death from atomic bombs are the only deaths that matter, so people that die during battle or millions of deaths from starvation from a blockade[1] are fine. This is just so divorced from reality I don't even understand what you are trying to say. Yeah, we could have just killed millions Japanese people with a blockade or kill 100,000 Americans and a million Japanese during an invasion. Atomic weapons were totally unneeded. [1]https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/victory-in-japan-army-navy-1945 https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/victory-in-ja...
bena 3y ago
We're closing in on the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II. To put that in perspective, the Civil War ended 80 years prior to that. We are almost as far removed from WWII as WWII is from the Civil War. While there are still people alive today who were alive during WWII, we're talking about people like Joe Biden, who is 80, who was 3 when it ended. It if very likely that no one who served is still alive. Our fathers and grandfathers are the ones who had fathers and grandfathers serve. All of our information about World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is from stuff written about it. Something told to someone who then told it to us. So of course there's a disconnect.

hef19898 3y ago

So? We talk WW2, military casualties were to be expected, weren't they? Just look at Soviet and Russian casualties on the Eastern front. Also, as an alternative to an invasion mainland Japan, cut them of by sea, bomb their cities to dust (still a war crime, but Tokyo was already fire bombed anyway), so basically what happened, atomic bombs or not. And yes, tze end of WW2 was predictable in mid 1944, no doubt about that in any shape or form. The details were up for grabs, sure, the overall outcome was not.

542354234235 3y ago
>military casualties were to be expected, weren't they? First, convenient to ignore the 100,000 civilian deaths. Second, what you are saying is the war was basically won* *After hundreds of thousands of additional military deaths fighting to completely dismantle Japan. >The details were up for grabs Again, these "details" are hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths. You are acting like death from atomic bombs are the only deaths that matter, so people that die during battle or millions of deaths from starvation from a blockade[1] are fine. This is just so divorced from reality I don't even understand what you are trying to say. Yeah, we could have just killed millions Japanese people with a blockade or kill 100,000 Americans and a million Japanese during an invasion. Atomic weapons were totally unneeded. [1]https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/victory-in-japan-army-navy-1945 https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/victory-in-ja...

bena 3y ago

We're closing in on the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II. To put that in perspective, the Civil War ended 80 years prior to that. We are almost as far removed from WWII as WWII is from the Civil War. While there are still people alive today who were alive during WWII, we're talking about people like Joe Biden, who is 80, who was 3 when it ended. It if very likely that no one who served is still alive. Our fathers and grandfathers are the ones who had fathers and grandfathers serve. All of our information about World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is from stuff written about it. Something told to someone who then told it to us. So of course there's a disconnect.