7 ms·

Hiroshima and the Myths of Military Targets and Unconditional Surrender (2020)

24 points by bluish29 3y ago

jeswin 3y ago
> This principle applies at the end of a war as well. Because it would have entailed the awful human costs of an invasion, Truman’s demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender to end the war was indefensible. When 75 million people have died across the world and nations destroyed, I don't think it's unfair to demand the unconditional surrender of the belligerents. Even by today's morality.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
> Truman’s demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender to end the war was indefensible. I don't think that Japan deserved any sort of mercy after what they did in the 30's and 40's to China and the surrounding area, not to mention provoking war with the United States.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  Civilians did not do that
  - t3rra 3y ago
    Japanese had killed so many civilians from other countries. They did not do any harm to Japan. So what?
    - JackeJR 3y ago
      2 wrong does not make 1 right
      - nickcox 3y ago
        Yeah, that is pretty much Ethics 101. I think it's time to bring back ethics lessons in schools.
        shepherdjerred 3y ago
        Ethics is a great intellectual exercise. Ethics does nothing to protect the innocent.
    - seanthemon 3y ago
      Following your logic: "America had killed so many civilians from other countries..."
      - shepherdjerred 3y ago
        The United States has done a lot of wrong in the world, and has taken many innocent lives. It has not done anything near the magnitude of Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. If the United States engaged in _true_, genocide, killed millions, or annexed other countries, then I would fully support a war against it. I don't believe that the United States has done more wrong than good in its existence purely because of the atrocities of the Axis.
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      This is the logic terrorist groups use.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    One of the reasons given was the bomb would save more civilian lives by not extending the war. Estimated 30 million.
    - lmm 3y ago
      By that logic any violation of the rules of war is justified, as long as you win afterwards.
  - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    This line of argument always seems weird to me. The Imperial Japanese Army was made up of conscripted _civilians_. Fathers, sons, brothers, uncles; ordinary folk from all walks of life were conscripted into the IJA and given training and sent off to invade other parts of Asia, where they committed various atrocities on a par with the Nazis. Civilians did do that. As for why, IMO the strong militarism that was part of their culture in that era is probably a large part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism
    - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      Technically speaking every military is made up of civilians … every soldier was once a civilian. That said, there is a difference between you voluntarily signing up to join the military and you being dragged into it.
      - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
        To state the obvious, civilians can get dragged into something and manage not to commit atrocities. The conscripts of the IJA weren't trained specifically to commit atrocities. They weren't drugged, lobotomized, or transformed into robots either. What they did came from within themselves.
        TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
        > The conscripts of the IJA weren't trained specifically to commit atrocities. Maybe not directly. 100s of thousands of people don't commit atrocities just out of the blue. Their doctrine was pretty hardcore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoichi_Yokoi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoichi_Yokoi
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    Ultimately it is the civilians who provide the resources for their government and military to function. If your government engaged in widespread offensive wars that leave millions dead, then I think that your civilians become a valid military target. If your country isn't respecting the other civilians, then why would you expect another country to respect your civilians?
    - catlover76 3y ago
      > If your country isn't respecting the other civilians, then why would you expect another country to respect your civilians? At a time when we have seen the Israel-Palestine conflict ratchet up to the worst levels of violence in decades, maybe we should be hesitant to accept this position. This kind of thinking on both sides there is part of how and why they are where they are.
      - shepherdjerred 3y ago
        You might interpret my previous comment as saying "it's okay to kill civilians", which wasn't my point. To phrase it a little better: if some country is committing atrocities at scale, then I believe any amount of force is justified to bring that to an end.
        catlover76 3y ago
        Yeah, sorry, after rereading your comment, I realized I may have responded to a point you didn't quite make.
    - kiba 3y ago
      History has demonstrated that kind of thinking is going to harden resolve. It's militarily useless and morally repugnant.
- kiba 3y ago
  The article argued that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima isn't really a military necessity. I would also argue that the crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army can only be remedied through military defeat and tribunals afterward, not terror bombing civilians.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The nuclear bombs are entirely orthogobal to the bombing of H & N. What many seem to have forgotten is that H&N were cities already on a kill list. Prior to the atomic bombs being dropped the US had already carpet bombed 72 other cities, including Tokyo, and they had a list of future targets to destroy. H&N were picked off that list as they were essentially untouched at that point and were "clean ground" to test the field use of two different bomb designs after the "lab test" at Trinity. The argument is whether a policy of total warfare | destruction was neccesary, the carpet bombing of cities to date was much more cost effective (at that point in the war) than the use of limited extremely expensive atomic weapons. The neccessity to use bombs developed to counter possible German atomic weapons on a rapidly dwindling Japan now that Germany had been defeated was a kind of military necessity .. the window for live field testing was rapidly closing given the approach of Russians from the north and relative lack of untouched targets. That aside, the bald unpleasant fact of the time is simple; had H&N not been atom bombed they would have been firebombed .. with very similar levels of death and follow on disease.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Yes, somehow people forget that Tokyo bombing was even costlier in human lives than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Then the military usefulness, and the morality, of these fire bombing would deserve to be questioned as much as the atomic bombing (they may even have prolonged the war, by strengthening the Japanese resolve)
    - anon84873628 3y ago
      Well beyond "live field testing on untouched targets", the purpose of dropping the bombs was to display the capability to the USSR, and thus assert the US position as hegemon.
hotnfresh 3y ago
> We find no evidence that anyone within the Truman administration undertook a formal legal analysis of the attack options in 1945. I mean… they’d already firebombed a lot of cities to similar effect. Japanese and German. We may wish they’d considered the morality or legality more thoughtfully in all cases, but it’s not an aberration that they went with “meh, kill them all” in the case of the A-bombs. The tool was (notably! Especially in hindsight) different, but the effect was similar to what they’d achieved in prior cases.
- lmm 3y ago
  It was absolutely not aberrant. No-one had clean hands and this should not surprise us. But people want simple stories of good vs evil and can't possibly bear to admit that their side did some war crimes too.
Thrir94994i 3y ago
Last paragraph is very scary. US president holds a button that can destroy the world. Great responsibility! It must be an intelligent person of highest personal integrity!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  Plenty of other individuals have similar "buttons".
causi 3y ago
In light of the Ichioku Gyokusai, I would've done the exact same thing. If it was overkill they would've surrendered after the first one.
thurn 3y ago
Dr. Alex Wellerstein has a lot of great writing on this subject on his blog and on the /r/askhistorians subreddit under the username 'restricteddata'. The way I see the field these days is a lot of hovering around a "middle" position on the bombs, as opposed to the extreme "ends" of the spectrum ("totally justified, best decision ever" vs. "terrible war crime done just to look tough"). The authors you are quoting, like Zinn (and Kuznik, who is also quoted by another response), are I think pretty anomalous in that they still stake out a hard, confident position on one end of the spectrum. (There are a few who stake out the other end, too.) The "middle" position, what the historian J. Samuel Walker calls "the consensus view", basically says that the bombs were seen as a perfectly fine, if not a little unusual, military decision, that they might not have been solely responsible for the surrender of Japan, and that the use of the bombs in the way they were used (on cities, little spacing, early August) was a mixture of vaguely strategic thinking (no "grand plan" on anyone's part, but people did have some ideas about what you might get out of doing it that way) and complete happenstance (the spacing between the bombs, and the fact that they had two ready to go in early August, depended on external factors that had nothing to do with real strategy). https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zuffw/some_historians_say_that_the_argument_that_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zuffw/some_... has a detailed discussion of the issue.
nico 3y ago
The timing of this article now seems to be making a reference/parallel to what is going on now with Israel/Gaza
chmod600 3y ago
WW2 was ended quickly and our two primary enemies became not just our allies, they also joined us as top-5 economic powerhouses. That's really something to be proud of on many levels. The bombs were horrific but also seem likely to have contributed to that outcome.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  I think about that quite a lot. It's strange how friendly Japan and Germany are considering how terrible WW2 was. I still don't really understand how such a large shift could occur in such a small amount of time.
  - chmod600 3y ago
    Japan and Germany were two of the best foreign policy outcomes in the history of humanity. They were defeated decisively but not destroyed and they people were not subjugated for any long period of time (except East Germany). They recovered peacefully and their people are free and prosperous. It's hard to think about for much time without coming to the conclusion that America did some important things right. But it's really out of fashion to say so nowadays.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Not at all, it's entirely ok to say that the USofA did the right thing by post war Germany and Japan while still acknowledging that its work with banana republics, coups in Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq Invasion, Afghanistan, etc. was pretty much a total shit show. We might also ask whether the false flag(??!!) invasion of the Phillipines was entirely justified, and question the policy approaches that lead to the pre war bunker oil blockading of Japan were the best line to take .. but these are matters for history classes at this point in time.
  - catlover76 3y ago
    It's pretty interesting and anomalous. IMO, its a testament to the strength of their cultures and societies. Things like the Marshal Plan helped Europe. Would be interested to know if there are any books or articles specifically discussing this. Worth asking r/askhistorians

24 points by bluish29 3y ago

> This principle applies at the end of a war as well. Because it would have entailed the awful human costs of an invasion, Truman’s demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender to end the war was indefensible. When 75 million people have died across the world and nations destroyed, I don't think it's unfair to demand the unconditional surrender of the belligerents. Even by today's morality.

shepherdjerred 3y ago

> Truman’s demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender to end the war was indefensible. I don't think that Japan deserved any sort of mercy after what they did in the 30's and 40's to China and the surrounding area, not to mention provoking war with the United States.

School-Cotton 3y ago
Civilians did not do that
- t3rra 3y ago
  Japanese had killed so many civilians from other countries. They did not do any harm to Japan. So what?
  - JackeJR 3y ago
    2 wrong does not make 1 right
    - nickcox 3y ago
      Yeah, that is pretty much Ethics 101. I think it's time to bring back ethics lessons in schools.
      - shepherdjerred 3y ago
        Ethics is a great intellectual exercise. Ethics does nothing to protect the innocent.
  - seanthemon 3y ago
    Following your logic: "America had killed so many civilians from other countries..."
    - shepherdjerred 3y ago
      The United States has done a lot of wrong in the world, and has taken many innocent lives. It has not done anything near the magnitude of Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. If the United States engaged in _true_, genocide, killed millions, or annexed other countries, then I would fully support a war against it. I don't believe that the United States has done more wrong than good in its existence purely because of the atrocities of the Axis.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    This is the logic terrorist groups use.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  One of the reasons given was the bomb would save more civilian lives by not extending the war. Estimated 30 million.
  - lmm 3y ago
    By that logic any violation of the rules of war is justified, as long as you win afterwards.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  This line of argument always seems weird to me. The Imperial Japanese Army was made up of conscripted _civilians_. Fathers, sons, brothers, uncles; ordinary folk from all walks of life were conscripted into the IJA and given training and sent off to invade other parts of Asia, where they committed various atrocities on a par with the Nazis. Civilians did do that. As for why, IMO the strong militarism that was part of their culture in that era is probably a large part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    Technically speaking every military is made up of civilians … every soldier was once a civilian. That said, there is a difference between you voluntarily signing up to join the military and you being dragged into it.
    - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
      To state the obvious, civilians can get dragged into something and manage not to commit atrocities. The conscripts of the IJA weren't trained specifically to commit atrocities. They weren't drugged, lobotomized, or transformed into robots either. What they did came from within themselves.
      - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
        > The conscripts of the IJA weren't trained specifically to commit atrocities. Maybe not directly. 100s of thousands of people don't commit atrocities just out of the blue. Their doctrine was pretty hardcore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoichi_Yokoi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoichi_Yokoi
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  Ultimately it is the civilians who provide the resources for their government and military to function. If your government engaged in widespread offensive wars that leave millions dead, then I think that your civilians become a valid military target. If your country isn't respecting the other civilians, then why would you expect another country to respect your civilians?
  - catlover76 3y ago
    > If your country isn't respecting the other civilians, then why would you expect another country to respect your civilians? At a time when we have seen the Israel-Palestine conflict ratchet up to the worst levels of violence in decades, maybe we should be hesitant to accept this position. This kind of thinking on both sides there is part of how and why they are where they are.
    - shepherdjerred 3y ago
      You might interpret my previous comment as saying "it's okay to kill civilians", which wasn't my point. To phrase it a little better: if some country is committing atrocities at scale, then I believe any amount of force is justified to bring that to an end.
      - catlover76 3y ago
        Yeah, sorry, after rereading your comment, I realized I may have responded to a point you didn't quite make.
  - kiba 3y ago
    History has demonstrated that kind of thinking is going to harden resolve. It's militarily useless and morally repugnant.
kiba 3y ago
The article argued that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima isn't really a military necessity. I would also argue that the crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army can only be remedied through military defeat and tribunals afterward, not terror bombing civilians.
- defrost 3y ago
  The nuclear bombs are entirely orthogobal to the bombing of H & N. What many seem to have forgotten is that H&N were cities already on a kill list. Prior to the atomic bombs being dropped the US had already carpet bombed 72 other cities, including Tokyo, and they had a list of future targets to destroy. H&N were picked off that list as they were essentially untouched at that point and were "clean ground" to test the field use of two different bomb designs after the "lab test" at Trinity. The argument is whether a policy of total warfare | destruction was neccesary, the carpet bombing of cities to date was much more cost effective (at that point in the war) than the use of limited extremely expensive atomic weapons. The neccessity to use bombs developed to counter possible German atomic weapons on a rapidly dwindling Japan now that Germany had been defeated was a kind of military necessity .. the window for live field testing was rapidly closing given the approach of Russians from the north and relative lack of untouched targets. That aside, the bald unpleasant fact of the time is simple; had H&N not been atom bombed they would have been firebombed .. with very similar levels of death and follow on disease.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Yes, somehow people forget that Tokyo bombing was even costlier in human lives than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Then the military usefulness, and the morality, of these fire bombing would deserve to be questioned as much as the atomic bombing (they may even have prolonged the war, by strengthening the Japanese resolve)
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    Well beyond "live field testing on untouched targets", the purpose of dropping the bombs was to display the capability to the USSR, and thus assert the US position as hegemon.

hotnfresh 3y ago

> We find no evidence that anyone within the Truman administration undertook a formal legal analysis of the attack options in 1945. I mean… they’d already firebombed a lot of cities to similar effect. Japanese and German. We may wish they’d considered the morality or legality more thoughtfully in all cases, but it’s not an aberration that they went with “meh, kill them all” in the case of the A-bombs. The tool was (notably! Especially in hindsight) different, but the effect was similar to what they’d achieved in prior cases.

lmm 3y ago
It was absolutely not aberrant. No-one had clean hands and this should not surprise us. But people want simple stories of good vs evil and can't possibly bear to admit that their side did some war crimes too.

Thrir94994i 3y ago

Last paragraph is very scary. US president holds a button that can destroy the world. Great responsibility! It must be an intelligent person of highest personal integrity!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shepherdjerred 3y ago
Plenty of other individuals have similar "buttons".

causi 3y ago

In light of the Ichioku Gyokusai, I would've done the exact same thing. If it was overkill they would've surrendered after the first one.

thurn 3y ago

Dr. Alex Wellerstein has a lot of great writing on this subject on his blog and on the /r/askhistorians subreddit under the username 'restricteddata'. The way I see the field these days is a lot of hovering around a "middle" position on the bombs, as opposed to the extreme "ends" of the spectrum ("totally justified, best decision ever" vs. "terrible war crime done just to look tough"). The authors you are quoting, like Zinn (and Kuznik, who is also quoted by another response), are I think pretty anomalous in that they still stake out a hard, confident position on one end of the spectrum. (There are a few who stake out the other end, too.) The "middle" position, what the historian J. Samuel Walker calls "the consensus view", basically says that the bombs were seen as a perfectly fine, if not a little unusual, military decision, that they might not have been solely responsible for the surrender of Japan, and that the use of the bombs in the way they were used (on cities, little spacing, early August) was a mixture of vaguely strategic thinking (no "grand plan" on anyone's part, but people did have some ideas about what you might get out of doing it that way) and complete happenstance (the spacing between the bombs, and the fact that they had two ready to go in early August, depended on external factors that had nothing to do with real strategy). https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zuffw/some_historians_say_that_the_argument_that_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zuffw/some_... has a detailed discussion of the issue.

nico 3y ago

The timing of this article now seems to be making a reference/parallel to what is going on now with Israel/Gaza

chmod600 3y ago

WW2 was ended quickly and our two primary enemies became not just our allies, they also joined us as top-5 economic powerhouses. That's really something to be proud of on many levels. The bombs were horrific but also seem likely to have contributed to that outcome.

shepherdjerred 3y ago
I think about that quite a lot. It's strange how friendly Japan and Germany are considering how terrible WW2 was. I still don't really understand how such a large shift could occur in such a small amount of time.
- chmod600 3y ago
  Japan and Germany were two of the best foreign policy outcomes in the history of humanity. They were defeated decisively but not destroyed and they people were not subjugated for any long period of time (except East Germany). They recovered peacefully and their people are free and prosperous. It's hard to think about for much time without coming to the conclusion that America did some important things right. But it's really out of fashion to say so nowadays.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Not at all, it's entirely ok to say that the USofA did the right thing by post war Germany and Japan while still acknowledging that its work with banana republics, coups in Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq Invasion, Afghanistan, etc. was pretty much a total shit show. We might also ask whether the false flag(??!!) invasion of the Phillipines was entirely justified, and question the policy approaches that lead to the pre war bunker oil blockading of Japan were the best line to take .. but these are matters for history classes at this point in time.
- catlover76 3y ago
  It's pretty interesting and anomalous. IMO, its a testament to the strength of their cultures and societies. Things like the Marshal Plan helped Europe. Would be interested to know if there are any books or articles specifically discussing this. Worth asking r/askhistorians