Thoughts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was it the Right Call?

[Nick B]

Thats ok then. As long as you can justify mass killing of innocent people it's fine.
We killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, but it's ok because they might have done the same. And it's less than the nazis killed so its okay.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

The japanese were working on their own bomb, given their conduct actions in China and other places , what do suppose they would have done had they gotten there first? 55 million people perished because of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan and had they won million more would have died.

Would they? People around the world were suffering long after World War II. My grandfather died many years later but it was complications from the war that killed him. Would the regimes have lasted as long as the impact of the war? We don't know that. And are the regimes we protected that much more virtuous? They're not any less corrupt.

And because we had an atomic bomb couldn't Japan have justified their use based on the fact we had one and could use it against them? Would we be so blase about a bomb that hit America? I'm pretty sure Americans wouldn't really be bothered about devastation in Europe they've proved again and again they're not. I don't think many British people would tell French, Germans or Spaniards they don't know anything about being attacked or terrorism.

 

[BAYLOR]

Thats ok then. As long as you can justify mass killing of innocent people it's fine.
We killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, but it's ok because they might have done the same. And it's less than the nazis killed so its okay.

Your just looking for something to pointlessly argue about aren't you?

Would they? People around the world were suffering long after World War II. My grandfather died many years later but it was complications from the war that killed him. Would the regimes have lasted as long as the impact of the war? We don't know that. And are the regimes we protected that much more virtuous? They're not any less corrupt.

Anya forget it, Neither You nor Quellist are right about this . In that time frame the decisions and reasons to bomb both places were the correct ones. It's very easy to do the revisionist line about "Oh how terrible we shouldn't have done it." The Axis powers started the the war with malevolent intent.

 

[Nick B]

No, I am not pointlessly arguing. The thread is to discuss whether the nuclear bombing of two cities was the right call. My stand is that no, it is not justifiable nor was it the right call.

You asked the contraversal question, as you often do (and I am not a troll, this is a thing I feel strongly about), this is my view. I like your line of questioning. Difficult questions need to be asked. But be ready for uncomfortable answers.

 

[DPWright]

If Hitler had surrendered like all generals secretly wanted him to when the allies landed in Normandy then that would have saved the lives of over 300,000 soldiers and civilIan and many 10s of thousands more from starvation/homeless ect. The war was loat for them, everyone knew it but Hitler. However they were fanatics and fought on extending the war by another year. The japenese were also fanatics and would have fought for every inch of soil. The Americans knew this. Now I'm no advocate for violence of any kind but whose to say 100,000 people dying by atomic bomb didn't save a further 200000 fron dying in a prolonged war? I'm not saying it's right but in war this decisions have to be made. The allis had learnt from Europe the consequences of a prolonged war.

 

[DPWright]

Excuse my poor typing. Big fingers and my phone's small keypad are a bad combination...

 

[BAYLOR]

No, I am not pointlessly arguing. The thread is to discuss whether the nuclear bombing of two cities was the right call. My stand is that no, it is not justifiable nor was it the right call.

You asked the contraversal question, as you often do (and I am not a troll, this is a thing I feel strongly about), this is my view. I like your line of questioning. Difficult questions need to be asked. But be ready for uncomfortable answers.

We have the advantage/disadvantage of historical hindsight . The problem is that we weren't there to see the situation as it occurred. In the context of the times and the circumstances. They were the correct decisions.

Your quite correct there is nothing at all wrong with asking difficult questions.

 

[Ursa major]

You take out the soldiers, the weapons, the command. You can't kill thousands of civillians

You must have missed my posts where I pointed out that the soldiers were mostly conscripts (i.e. civilians who were sent to fight) and their deaths are no less worthy of regret than those of un-conscripted civilians.

I think our attitudes to the deaths of soldiers are too much influenced by all those battles and wars fought by (often relatively small numbers of) volunteers and mercenaries, where those who risked their lives in conflict made a conscious decision to join up.

 

[mosaix]

Regarding the general point of the thread. I'd be interested to know why the nuclear attack has been singled out for discussion when the non-nuclear fire-bombing of Tokyo killed more people (approximately 100,000). Does the delivery system really have any significance in comparison to the number of casualties?

Sorry if this has already been mentioned / discussed.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Maybe the USA didn't want Russia to beat the Japanese.
Hiroshima: 70,000 initial Deaths and about 70,000 radiation deaths.
Fire-bombing of Tokyo was a war crime too.
Okinawa is always brought up as an excuse, but that is 100% misleading and doesn't take account of possible blockades and the increasing Russian shipments to the East once VE occurred and huge successes Russians were having attacking Japanese Military. They didn't really start attacks till after War in Europe ended and they got stuff shipped east by rail.

The USA was simply impatient.

BUT ... Should leaders or countries be actually apologising for wrong actions of people 70 to 75 years ago? Or 100 years ago (WWI) or Boer War, Or 1905 Russian - Japanese war, or Ireland 1916 (both sides criminally wrong). Saying it was wrong isn't same as Apologising. Are the nations that committed war crimes on both sides 1936 to 1945 worried about compensation claims?

Everything in the last half dozen posts has been said before in the thread, I can't see either side changing view point. We can't ever say the ends always justifies the means. Possibly the question is why did they drop a second one so quickly?

 

[mosaix]

Thats ok then. As long as you can justify mass killing of innocent people it's fine.
We killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, but it's ok because they might have done the same. And it's less than the nazis killed so its okay.

Hi Quellist. I think you need to define your term 'innocent'. Okay, without a doubt, there were children and Japanese adults who were against the war who were killed. There were also prisoners of war and Korean slave labourers. But a large part of the population, as in any nation at war, were part of the war effort - supporting the armed forces, manufacturing munitions etc.

 

[Brian G Turner]

The BBC has an interesting piece on the moral issues:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33754931

Interesting to read that the American government allegedly suppressed the showing of films made of the after-effects.

We have the benefit of coldly evaluating the historical facts, but it also appears that "terror bombing" by the allies - the specific targeting of civilians - was hidden from the allied public during WWII.

 

[Ursa major]

I'd be interested to know why the nuclear attack has been singled out for discussion when the non-nuclear fire-bombing of Tokyo killed more people (approximately 100,000). Does the delivery system really have any significance in comparison to the number of casualties?

I was thinking about this yesterday, but in the context of the whole war. It struck me, and still does, that there was more (strategic) point to the nuclear attack on Hiroshima (and, perhaps, that on Nagasaki) than there was to, for example, Dresden (although I understand that there are those who defend the Dresden attack based on its strategic position with respect to Germany's transport infrastructure).

What Dresden wasn't was any sort of warning shot, which Hiroshima surely was. (What it also was, in terms of the destruction, was one of very many cities reduced to rubble**.)

So, speaking as a Brit, I see the Dresden attack as much more worthy of being described as a war crime than Hiroshima, as I don't think it either changed the overall course of the war in Europe, or was seriously intended to do so. (I suspect that it was just another ratcheting up of the bombing campaign, almost done because it could be done, and because it fitted in with the mindset of the time, based on years of escalating attacks on large cities.)


** - As part of a holiday tour in the 1980s, I stayed a night I Hannover. Near the hotel was a museum, which contained a number of models depicting (the centre of) Hannover at various points in its history. The model of Hannover in 1945 showed not a single building with an intact roof. (In fact, I can't recall seeing any roofs, intact or otherwise.) Hannover was, like Dresden, a transport hub. (According to Wiki, "only" 6000*** people were killed during the many allied bombing raids, which included those on residential areas****.)

*** - An estimated 42,600 civilians died (and 37,000 were injured) in eight continuous days (day and night) of raids on Hamburg.

**** - I have no idea if these were deliberately targeted: precision bombing was a rarity in those days.

 

[WaylanderToo]

Anya forget it, Neither You nor Quellist are right about this . In that time frame the decisions and reasons to bomb both places were the correct ones. It's very easy to do the revisionist line about "Oh how terrible we shouldn't have done it." The Axis powers started the the war with malevolent intent.

^^^ This!!! Dropping the bomb was at that point in time absolutely the right thing to do and from everything I have read did save lives.

As has been previously mentioned the fire bombing of various Japanese and German cities also caused mass casualties but somehow (with the exception of Dresden) these aren't mentioned with the same horror, strange old world.

 

[Nick B]

I think this is one of those discussions where the debate quickly becomes circular.
Luckily this community is polite and debates don't deteriorate into name calling.

We will agree to disagree.

War does not dictate who is right, only who is left.

 

[WaylanderToo]

**** - I have no idea if these were deliberately targeted: precision bombing was a rarity in those days.

I read somewhere that back then a bomb landed within 5 miles of target was considered to be on target (obviously attacks using Tallboy and Grandslam wouldn't be included in this) these days if it's just within 5 metres it's considered a poor show

 

[Ursa major]

I read somewhere that back then a bomb landed within 5 miles of target was considered to be on target

I've also heard that five miles figure.

 

[Mirannan]

There are no winners in war. But if you have to go to war, you attack their military machine. You take out the soldiers, the weapons, the command. You can't kill thousands of civillians and then try to claim the moral high ground, no matter what the enemy did to you.

The only way to be moraly superior to your enemy is to not sink to their level. Civillian casualties happen, we all know that, but knowingly drop a weapon of arbitrary death upon a civillian centre is unacceptable by any ethical outlook.

Two points about that: First, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military centres. (Arguably, the whole of every Japanese city was; military production had become a cottage industry, literally.) Second, precision strikes such as you describe were impossible with WWII technology. The general run of bomber crews had a CEP of hundreds of yards by war end - at the beginning, it was miles! The existence of small numbers of highly-trained specialists is irrelevant to that point.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

^^^ This!!! Dropping the bomb was at that point in time absolutely the right thing to do and from everything I have read did save lives.

As has been previously mentioned the fire bombing of various Japanese and German cities also caused mass casualties but somehow (with the exception of Dresden) these aren't mentioned with the same horror, strange old world.

Actually, I have said the same about Dresden (and carpet bombing in general), the Dambuster raid (although I love the film), the use of Agent Orange and other chemical warfare over the years, going over the top during WWII when they were using soldiers as nothing more than cannon fodder etc However, the difference between Dresden, and chemical or nuclear warfare or mines is that with carpet bombing the physical harm done to people ends when the war does. It doesn't continue to physically harm the next generations although they do have to clean up the mess left and the mental scars go on for decades. Dresden was appalling. People, innocents including children, cooked in bomb shelters like they did in Herculeum. It was very much a war crime. With the Mohne Dam etc that was acknowledged as so appalling after the war that it was made a war crime for future wars.

My views weren't formed by revisionists. They were formed by people who were right in the middle of all this and who I grew up around. Unusually, my family didn't lose a single person in either WW1 or WWII (except a very distant cousin in Australia) so they all came home. I had a great-aunt who'd been in Dresden and a grandfather who was a navigator who I think might have been involved with several carpet bombing raids - whether Dresden was one I do not know. My grandfather hated Churchill for the things he witnessed in war that were never reported. He said that's why he wasn't voted back in after the war - too many had seen too much. I come from a family who lived in Liverpool and London during World War II. My great-gran, gran and great-aunts refused to use air raid shelters, and my aunt was not evacuated with other children. (My uncle by marriage was sent back because he burned down a school). As a child I walked around and saw bomb sites. The city I lived in was still recovering in the 1980s. As my grandfather said what's the point of fighting and giving your life for something just as evil as that you're fighting against.

Hiroshima was one of the first acts of war I remember hearing about. A man who watched it happen and was one of the first British naval officers in Japan after it happened. The other was a great-uncle in the Merchant Navy who had also been in Japan shortly after. The first gentleman came home, like my grandfather, a pacifist. At the start of WWII my family had one conscientious objector. By 1946 we had far more. Remembrance Sunday 1983, the gentleman who had witnessed Hiroshima got up and spoke of his experience to an audience made up mostly of those who had been there and done that during the World Wars (in some cases both of them). His speech was incredibly well received. Even those that hated Germans were shocked by Dresden.

It's only in 2003 I got to watch someone die from Agent Orange.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I've also heard that five miles figure.

First ever bombing raid during World War One. (my figures are dodgy but the idea is there) 80 fighters turned back due to poor weather, one tried to bomb the British Fleet, another neutral bombed neutral Denmark, two made the designated target. Even now with precision bombing there is room for error. The fact we don't have a decent replacement for the Nimrod can't be helping with that.