I have lots of Japanese family and friends, and none of them understand the horrors of WW2. As far as they were taught, America just randomly dropped nukes on them. They're mad because they think of Japan as a victim, not a monster that needed to be stopped. They raped and pillaged everyone who wasn't Japanese.
At least Germany teaches their kids about their atrocities in hopes that they never repeat it.
Japan was definitely a monster that needed to be stopped. But to say that made it okay to drop two nukes instantly killing thousands of civilians is not okay in any case.
Mostly agreed. Historians and philosophers can argue ad nauseum about if the bombs were the only way to end the war, but we literally can't know. Some argue that everyone will listen to the emperor while others argue that they would fight to a long, drawn-out death, citing the coup that happened even after the Japanese saw the immense power of the bombs.
My comments just give insight into the ferocity with which they attack the movie. Japan doesn't teach their population about all of the war, the invasion of China and the Philippines, the rape of Nanjing...any of it. They are only taught that they were one day minding their own business when Americans destroyed two cities. It makes sense they don't want to consume this media.
From what I understand this is not the main point of contention among historians. That Imperialist Japan, like all Axis powers, was a cancer that demanded amputation was not the justification for the deployment of nukes. Rather, the debatable justification was their leadership's inability to surrender unconditionally.
But to say that made it okay to drop two nukes instantly killing thousands of civilians is not okay in any case.
My understanding was they were actually attacking manufacturing for the war, it's just that an atom bomb is not that discriminatory, and that all the military-only targets had already been bombed out of existence by that point.
Not saying it was right, just explaining it wasn't as black-and-white as you express.
More? It feels like nine out of ten war movies focus on WW2. You can't throw a stone at IMDB without hitting three WW2 movies and a series along the way.
You had one that Hitler just revived in the parking lot he died and he started talking with some people and it was chilling as fuck.
Like tou are talking about how immigration is shit with a guy dressed as Fuckin HITLER!?
So, you need more films? I guess hollywood just ran out of ideas.... What about a film of nazis in a desertish mediterranean setup, fighting natives with modern american weapons, because idk... time travel? And spoken entirely in hebrew?
There have been so many movies and series just the past few years though... many really good too, and many that go pretty far in showing how horrible the nazis were.
"If you violate the Geneva Convention, your people don't get the protections of it" seems like a pretty reasonable way to justify the bombings tbh
In any case, there are some important considerations to be made here too:
After the horrors of Okinawa, US leadership expected a million casualties to take Japan itself, to the point where the Navy wanted to simply blockade Japan into submission. Given the Japanese civilians were already eating acorns and tree bark, and the military's entire outward appearance was to never surrender, it isn't unreasonable to assume Japan wouldn't have given up.
Of course, the Japanese were refusing to surrender to the US in order to surrender through the USSR in hopes of getting a better deal (protect the emperor, no war crime trials, etc.). Of course, the Soviets invaded Manchuria and dashed all hopes of that, which, according to many people, was the real reason for Japan's surrender.
It is a bit murky, but in response to the bombings and the invasion, there was a meeting on August 9th of the highest ranks of the Japanese government where it was determined that surrender was the only option and plans were drawn up to do so. However, on the 14th, there was an attempted coup by some army officers to continue the war, which failed after several high ranking officials refused to comply, among other things.
All of this taken together is not to say "the bombings were necessary," but rather to show the situation as it developed, and how many different things could have gone wrong and dragged the war on for longer (side note: Japan still held a lot of territory and there were plans to liquidate POWs and the like in the event of surrender)
Was it right to vaporize thousands? In a vacuum, no, certainly not. But in the complex context of a war in which millions had already died and millions more still very well could have, its tough to say.
I mean, sure it's horrible, but again, understanding the context behind decisions is important to getting a full idea of why something was done.
Take something like strategic bombing, which killed more people by a country mile than the atomic bombings. Does anyone bitch on the same level about how many people were killed by regular bombing? Hell, Operation Meetinghouse (the firebombing of Toyko in March 1945) killed something like 150k people in a single raid, and nobody says a goddamned word about it outside of historical circles.
At the end of the day, the idea behind strategic bombing (in the case of the Allies) was that it was a good way to damage the enemy's war effort. The killing of civilians wasn't the objective (unlike the Germans, who explicitly employed terror bombing of civilians as a tactic). Its the cold calculus of fighting a modern war - the enemy's capacity to fight is the ability for them to make more things to fight with, so eliminating that capacity by demolishing factories and houses is a good strategy. The killing of civilians wasn't the objective necessarily - breaking the apparatus they participated in was.
In some ways it's actually better to simply leave millions homeless instead of killing them, as the enemy must house and feed these people instead of using those resources for fighting...
Either way, would you have rather the US blockaded Japan to death to force a surrender? Killing untold numbers of civilians from starvation and disease than a relatively small number of civilians in 2 places? Maybe we wouldn't have needed to if the Russian invasion was enough to scare them into surrender, but we'll never know that for sure...
What would you have done against an enemy that gave every indication they were planning to fight to the death?
Just for the people who want to defend a nearly 100 year old tragedy for some reason. Here is a document from the US armed forces calling you a fucking idiot.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945. Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war. and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. - The United States Strategic Bombing survey (European war) (Pacific War) https://ia801903.us.archive.org/33/items/unitedstatesstra00cent/unitedstatesstra00cent.pdf
When Hiroshima was erased in less than a second, the Japanese navy had been eradicated.
The status of their mainland holdings was irrelevant, because they were under blockade.
Their air force was out of planes, oil, and pilots.
Their mechanization program basically never happened in the first place, and their tanks were irrelevant to a military that had marched to Berlin.
Their miracle weapon programs were failures or still in development.
They'd lost 2 million troops trying to conquer China, Korea, and the Philippines and killing 20 million people in the process.
They knew from the start that victory against America alone was impossible. The warmongers just thought the filthy gaijins would surrender if they sank enough of the Pacific Fleet.
They had agreed to abide by the Geneva Conventions and then immediately broke their word.
They had already seemingly refused a conditional surrender offer.
The person writing the paper that council of academics pulled their ideas from has been repeatedly found falsifying documents and denying the Rape of Nanking.
The USA waited three days between bombings to give them time to surrender in the face of power even the most delusional could not deny.
Do you know what happened instead?
The military tried to launch a coup to stop the surrender after the second bomb, the Kyuju incident. The War Minister tried to enlist the rest of the government to help against the wishes of their literal God Emperor.
Get fucking real with your "They were going to surrender anyways."
Now if want to argue the Allies should have just starved them out instead...
Maybe. How many peasants do you think the most zealous military cult in history would have let die before admitting defeat?
How much would you have spent offering mercy to an enemy that had none of their own?
"the military launched a coup". Really? The whole military? All against Hirohito himself. Musta been a Chad to single handedly stop the entire Japanese military from couping him.
What you meant to say is a cadre of young officers attempted to storm some government buildings before being put down quickly by the Japanese military.
But ya know what they say. Grain of truth and all that.
Hey, have you ever looked into the Japanese negotiation strategy for peace against the "unconditional terms" we ended up giving them? I'll save you the trouble, they are identical. The problem is that by refusing to negotiate and demanding unconditional surrender, you don't care about stopping the war and saving lives. You care about making your years of jingoistic demands seem legit. We demanded unconditional surrender not because we didn't like their terms, but because we needed to embarrass them for political points back home.
That is not worth nuking 2 cities for.
Imagine killing two urban centers worth of civilians for the sole purpose of proving a point. Scum.
Interesting fact about this document is that from what I recall, the air force pushed hard on the idea that bombing alone would be sufficient to win in an effort to secure funding when the US military downsized post-war. I'd fake its findings with at least a little grain of salt.
Also, it's not like we could really have simply sat on our hands until December...the American public wanted results and the cost if the war was astronomical already, so adding on months of mobilization and war economy to "save the lives of a few Japs" (to use the relatively widely held stance of Americans at the time) was never going to happen. To say nothing of the toll on human lives regular strategic bombing and famine conditions would inflict...
I do not wish to justify the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, if any good came out of it, I think showing the world the death, devastation and illness an atomic attack on a city can cause likely made world leaders pause before pushing the button. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes to mind. Would either party have backed down if no one had actually seen what even a relatively small bomb could do to a city?
The reasoning at the time was that the Japanese would not believe the U.S. could do it more than once and they would have to believe the U.S. could obliterate Japan in order to surrender.
I have no idea if that would have been true, but that was the idea. It certainly is true that the Japanese were being told to fight until every last man, woman and child on the islands died, so it was a desperate situation all around.
But the fact is that it was only a matter of time before someone developed an atomic bomb and no one has been crazy enough to use one in a war since 1945. The main reason for that, in my opinion, is that the world saw what happened.