Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary to the defeat Japan or was Japan already defeated and the bombs...

The cat was already out of the bag. Nukes would have been made one way or another. This was the best possible use of them.

Not really necessary to secure the defeat of Japan, but necessary to prevent an even larger amount of lives lost with a mainland invasion of Japan

This is assuming that the bombs directly influenced or compelled Japanese surrender for which you have no evidence.

You're acting as if circumstances didn't change by the time the bombs were dropped. Japan was ready to surrender, most of the top generals thought so, see my post above.

Japan wanted to surrender, but only if they could keep some of their conquests. The fanatics and hardliners would still dominate the government and Japan would continue to act belligerently after it recovered. It took 2 A-bombs to motivate moderate nationalists to overthrow them.

They were very rapidly losing their conquests. Russia literally was walking all over them in Manchuria. Any Japanese general with a 1/3 of a brain knew they couldn't hold these conquests with overwhelming air and naval superiority, even BEFORE Russia entered into the Pacific theater, against them.

The USSR had no way of getting their troops, armour, arty, etc. to Japan. Unless they were going to swim.

>Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary to the defeat Japan

Nope.

They easily could have just blockaded the islands and waited for a surrender. But by then they had already spent obscene amounts of money on manufacturing the bombs, so they had to justify the wasted money somehow.

A blockade would have killed more than the bombs did.

You're making the assumption that the A-bombs were integral to Japanese surrender and it would not have happened without it.

It's quite possible that Japan surrenders when they did even without the use of the bombs because the USSR's declaration of war made their insistence on a conditional peace untenable. In that scenario the bombs never saved any lives.

Possibly, but somehow melting two populous towns full of civilians with nuclear weapons leaving fall out causing horrible trauma and death for years and years afterward seems worse.

I dunno man. Most of the cities populations survived. You're looking at a couple hundred thousand dead + lasting trauma in two cities versus nation wide starvation leading to hundreds of thousands if not over a million deaths.

We had this thread five times this week already. Fuck off.

Not true. The Soviets had a great plan. They were going to ask the Americans to lend them landing craft.

That's under the assumption Japan wouldn't have surrendered with overwhelming air and naval superiority against them and rapidly shrinking areas of control on the mainland. Their whole reason for fighting on was for conditional surrender, to which a) they would hold onto foreign conquests, which was very very quickly becoming increasingly untenable with the entrance of Russia and the overwhelming air and naval superiority and defeat of Germany b) and maintenance of the royal family, which the Allies had agreed to. These were the two conditions Japan had, one of which was untenable and the other the Allies were granting them.

Indirectly. They US seriously offered Japan to surrender after the bombings, and this proposal was considered by the Japanese when the USSR started attacking.
The Soviets didn't have enough transport/landing craft, that's true, and if they barely could do an amphibian assault on the Kuril Islands, a possible invasion to Hokkaido would be a clusterfuck. At the end, the Soviets couldn't take more Japanese territory, but Japan surrendered because they neither did have a strong naval force to defend the north.

Who cares about necessity when you can have a gook BBQ?

*The

They surrendered because we made them believe we had hundreds more atomic bombs ready to go. They believed that we would annihilate every inch of japanese soil if they didn't. That's what it took to end the war and to save the lives of millions of japanese and Americans, two brutal atomic attacks to make them fold.
If you're against the atomic bombings then you're a cuck, a butthurt nip, or ignorant of history and need to gtfo.

>Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

t. Emperor Hirohito

kek the Japanese generals didn't really care about more bombing since there were only about 10 cities left, and some of them were unreachable.

>HURR KEK MUH ATOMIC BOMBSSSSSS GTFO

lurk moar

They surrendered because their navy was destroyed and so they literally had no way to fight back at that point. Murdering two entire cities after you've already won the war is pretty hard to justify.

japan didn't care about attrition per se. the fire bombings in the weeks proceeding the 'tomick bombings killed way more people, in one case over 250,000 in one bombing run in tokyo.

it was clear they lost, and their choice was to surrender to the allies or to the ruskies. that was a no-brainer.

>Thousands of men, women and children interred at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection, often without anesthesia and usually ending with the death of the victim.[18] Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results.[19] The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants, including pregnant women (impregnated by Japanese surgeons) and their infants.[20]
>Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen, then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting.
>Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners.[18]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Vivisection

>Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. Prisoners were also repeatedly subject to rape by guards.[22]
>Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed around and possibly more than 400,000 Chinese civilians.[23] Tularemia was tested on Chinese civilians.[24]
>Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644 and Unit 100 among others) were involved in research, development, and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both civilian and military) throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities, coastal Ningbo in 1940, and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1941. This military aerial spraying killed thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics.[25]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Germ_warfare_attacks

In a speech to the people it makes sense to downplay the failings of the government and to place blame squarely on a new 'super weapon' nobody could account for. Instead of blaming the Imperial government for launching them on a path of aggression across Asia and embroiling them in an unwinnable war against America, they're now the victims.

That quote is evidence of nothing more than an attempt at damage control by the Emperor.

That doesn't contradict anything, the fanatics wanted to fight to the last.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident

and he went-on to explain that we hated them for their freedoms, and how they tried to fight us "over there" so they wouldn't have to fight us "over here"

Why did the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff nor most of the top generals not believe this? Were they not in a position to assess Japan's ability to continue fighting?

It's also not like we now know the Japanese governments planning and communication behind the scenes. The hardline military commanders were fast losing authority, the situation was becoming uncontrollable at home (the coup attempt was a signal to this, which rumblings were heard much earlier in the year) the holdout that the Russians wouldn't enter the conflict against them or enter on their side was blasted into a million pieces when they invaded Manchuria.

fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htm

"One Hundred Million Souls for the Emperor!"

The intent of Ketsu-Go was to inflict tremendous casualties on the American forces, thereby undermining the American people's will to continue the fight for Japan's unconditional surrender. This intent is clear in a boastful comment made by an IGHQ army staff officer in July 1945:

We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions.

The defensive plan called for the use of the Civilian Volunteer Corps, a mobilization not of volunteers but of all boys and men 15 to 60 and all girls and women 17 to 40, except for those exempted as unfit. They were trained with hand grenades, swords, sickles, knives, fire hooks, and bamboo spears. These civilians, led by regular forces, were to make extensive use of night infiltration patrols armed with light weapons and demolitions. Also, the Japanese had not prepared, and did not intend to prepare, any plan for the evacuation of civilians or for the declaration of open cities. The southern third of Kyushu had a population of 2,400,000 within the 3,500 square miles included in the Prefectures of Kagoshima and Miyazaki. The defensive plan was to actively defend the few selected beach areas at the beach, and then to mass reserves for an all-out counterattack if the invasion forces succeeded in winning a beachhead.

>all this justifies turning two entire cities full of completely innoccent people into a pile of radioactive rubble

True, but remember we're making these claims with the foresight of hindsight. It's easy to make the correct decision after the fact, at the time atom bombs simply were not understood by most people. Few had actually seen the bomb itself, merely the report on it. It was assumed the bomb would be used when ready because... it was a weapon at a time of war. Why wouldn't you use a new weapon ready for deployment?

We also know now the Japanese balance of power had shifted away from the Army controlling negotiations. Several key members had finally gone over to the Emperor's camp, who had wanted to surrender for a time now, but there was no way for US intelligence to know that.
In fact, despite the surrender decision being made bilaterally, the Army holdouts still attempted to capture the Emperor and assassinate his supporters so they could continue the war. They failed due to treachery within their own ranks.

It's hard to say exactly what would have gone different without the bombs. Not just in Japan, but in the long run. Stalin ended up being fairly unimpressed with it when he read the ground report about how rail lines still remained usable except at ground zero, and how small the affected area actually was.

Hardened targets were not destroyed or even several damaged without being in the range of the fireball itself. Certainly, atomic weaponry dissuaded a Cold War from going Hot as nukes got more and more powerful, but how would the balance of power be viewed had the Americans merely claimed a weapon of unimaginable power Stalin would have known was real, without knowing just how powerful it was.

He would have certainly known the Allies only had 3, and they used one in testing by August of 1945. Would his paranoia of the West be a boon or a problem, in this light?
Again, hindsight is 20/20, looking at it from the point of view at the time thing become much muggier.

Just to be clear: the Japanese military intended for the struggle to take place for every single village, every block, every house. They didn't give a single fuck about civilians, and in fact counted on them to attack the Allied invaders with sharpened bamboo, if that's all they had.

The Japanese military junta that was running the war are directly responsible for the two atom bombs being used against their people.

>All these hindsight bias posts

It does actually. Japan played with fire, payed for it by getting rightfully burnt and ever since mensing little faggots like you have been whining how unfairly we treated a member of the axis powers who wanted to be able rape and murder their way across east asia while having the sheer audacity to ask us for oil and other material supplies to do said raping and murdering.

Start shit, get hit bitch.

>Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't valid military targets with a massive army base and the last operational large port along with significant communication lines and rail lines because muh feelings

Their plan called for the neutralization of as many transports as possible as the American fleet approached the shores of Japan. If landings were made, the air forces would conduct operations to sever supply lines to facilitate the fighting of the ground forces. Planes were to be released in waves of 300-400, at the rate of one wave per hour, against the invasion fleet. Sufficient fuel had been stored for this use, but only about 8,000 pilots were available.(24) Although the pilots were poorly trained and no match against experienced American pilots, they were capable enough to carry out suicide attacks against ships. At the end of the war, Japan had approximately 12,725 planes. The Army had 5,651 and the Navy had 7,074 aircraft of all types.(25) While many of these were not considered combat planes, almost all were converted into kamikaze planes. The Japanese were planning to train enough pilots to use all of the aircraft that were capable of flying.

This sounds like the last ditch ramblings of a Baghdad Bob general, they could barely prevent their population and different layers of the military from mutinying at the time and their own Emperor was working against them.

Yes, but US intelligence at the time did not know this. All experience with the Japanese had shown them to be literally suicidal. Even the civilians. Invasion itself was considered unviable without the use of nuclear weaponry one way or another.
FFS the plan to invade Japan with ground forces was no joke, to nuke the goddamn beaches then land the soldiers, because US intelligence knew the Japanese would never give up their home beach without a massive fight.

That's how little nuclear weapons were understood at the time. Nuke the beaches, then have men walk onto said nuked beaches.

This.

Not quite true. They were going to wait 1-3 days to let things subside.

nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf

FUCKING BEAUTIFUL

Except Japan didn't surrender because of the bombs. They surrendered because they sisn't want the Soviets to make them commies.

Nagasaki was a primarily Christian city, with considerable opposition to Japan's war effort. There was no reason to bomb it and Japan hardly cared that the US did so.

Which still would have led to millions of soldiers being irradiated. Basically no one at the time understood what radiation was, what it entailed, and how little it takes to kill you. Even the low yield bombs that were Fat Man and Little boy would still lead to fatal doses if you spend more than a passing through at or near ground zero days after the fact.

I legitimaitely do not think the bombs would have been used save by someone as insanely stupid as MacArthur had the full ramifications of them been known. Most people just didn't realize what a nuclear weapon actually entailed.

Yes, that Soviet invasion that was going to come in on that fleet they didn't have.

You realize Nagasaki was a largely Christian city which housed many anti-war civilians right?

Tough fucking shit, they were part of the war effort whether they liked it or not and cities in ww2 were legitimate targets for all sorts of reasons and neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were an exception to this.

I don't even know why people bring up Japanese atrocities as an excuse to kill civilians. Two wrongs don't make a right. It's possible to limit the damage as much as possible to military targets with day bombings. Bomb sights were very advanced by the end of the way.

The Americans also let unit 731 staff and imperial family members involved in war crimes walk away.

>Stalin successfully invaded the Kuril islands without a fleet
Uhhhhh

>whether they liked it or not
>legitimate
I'm not sure you understand what those words mean user

Oh yeah, his ELEVEN surviving landing craft were going to overrun Hokkaido

Do you know how small scale the Kuril islands invasion was?
And how horribly it went for the Soviets anyways?

Japan is probably better off for having had the bombs dropped but still any mass civilian casualities should be treated as an atrocity. In total war nobody is innocent of that though. So who cares really. The fire bombings probably claimed as many lives anyhow.

Firebombings killed almost twice as many, actually.

Dresden is the worst tbqh. It's a good thing Kyoto didn't get burnt down too.

Pretty sure the firebombing+blockade killed a lot more civilians

I know precisely what the words legitimate target means in the context of ww2 bombing campaigns. That you do not is not my problem.

Start shit, get hit bitch. Vengeance is a perfectly valid justification for action.

>Defeating 80000 troops with 15000 troops
>Horrible
Ok user. You do realize that STALIN's plan was just to invade Hokkaido right? Hokkaido was very poorly defended and not they heavily populated. It was well within the Soviet's capacity to invade the island.

Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire "The Soviet Navy's amphibious shipping resources were limited but sufficient to transport the three assault divisions in several echelons. The Red Army intended to seize the northern half of Hokkaido. If resistance proved strong, reinforcements would be deployed to aid the capture of the rest of Hokkaido. Given the size of Hokkaido, the Japanese would have been hard-pressed to move units for a concerted confrontation of the Soviet invasion. The chances of Soviet success appeared to be very good."

>Start shit, get hit bitch. Vengeance is a perfectly valid justification for action.
>Talks about vengeance
>Let a bunch of war criminals go including the worst sickos while killing tons of civilians and a few POWs on your own side

The Soviets did not actually fight most of the Japanese troops, and the Japanese surrendered early into the actual invasion.
Most of the fighting was done against Japanese soldiers who fought on despite the surrender order, which was a minority of forces.

Fair enough, but as my source points out the Soviet were planning an invasion of Hokkaido and were plently capable of doing so.

That was simply how everyone fought in WW2. Lots of civilians were slaughtered pretty much everywhere but in the U.S., which was only because they had oceans on both sides of them.

If you're going to pearl clutch and have a crisis of conscience only when the U.S. does it, and does it to arguably the single most evil nation by virtue of its actions involved in WW2, then why should anyone take you seriously?

I find it unlikely it would have come to pass. For one, had the Japanese not surrendered they would have been tied up in Kuril for at least another month. Maybe two. casualties would be higher.

And Hokkaido was much more well defended than the Kurils. In addition to army troops civilians would have been used as suicide troops, also certainly the Japanese would have used suicide planes. I mean, certainly the Soviets had the men and manpower to do it, as well as the disregard for human life needed to deal with the suicidal Japanese, but the added time spent at Kuril would have slowed down any invasion of Hokkiado, and certainly with threat of a Soviet invasion of Hokkiado the Japanese would have surrendered had they not historically surrendered in August like they did. I mean chances of the Soviets capturing Hokkiado is high, but it would involve a whole lot of dead people and a lot of time, and I just don't see it actually playing out unless the pro war military group murders all the other Japs who want to surrender, even the other pro war until we face extinction then we surrender Japs.

>If you're going to pearl clutch and have a crisis of conscience only when the U.S. does it,
This is a straw man argument. Just because I criticize the US doesn't mean that I think that ONLY America wrong.

>predicted 1 million American lives lost in the invasion of Japan
>or drop two nukes and still kill less Japs than the Tokyo firebombings
Hmm

This is a false dilemma.

good job user don't cut anybody on those smahts

>predicted 1 million American lives lost in the invasion of Japan
I wish people would stop this stupid fucking meme. Barbarossa was a predicted 12 week campaign with less than 500,000 casualties.

Might not have been necessary, but it was a nice light show.

To be fair, even the most hardened general would turn soft if he was made to witness the consequences of his decision, being made to look at multitude of burnt and mutilated corpses and the multitude of burnt and disfigured bodies of elderly men and women and children writhing in unbearable pain and suffering that you were in part responsible for.

I think this is the best argument here

You people are all forgetting that 1940 Japanese society the population actually believed that the Emperor was a God (or a decendent from a God) and they would all fight to the last Jap to defend their main land no matter how hopeless.

Thats why the pacific theatre where a fucking hell. They dropped the bomb because they wanted Japan to surrender UNCONDITIONALLY, not just surrender, and they pretty much had to use the A bomb, otherwise it would just have been used again later in an other war(probably between USSR vs Allies) but in higher quantity.

So, since the atomic bomb have only been used twice in warfare during our entire history, thus creating MAD and keeping the cold war cold, it saved unphantomly more lives than it killed.

However that was impossible for the yankes to know at that point, they just wanted to messure their dick.

The Emperor was maneuvering to surrender fully to allied demands long before the bombs were dropped. The hardline generals were losing their grip increasingly after it was apparent Germany would lose the war and even more so after Germany officially surrendered leading to a coup attempt.

Do you have any source that supports your claim that Japan was willing to surrender unconditionally pre Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Because I have never heard of it, peace? Sure, but being an american puppet removing the emperor? Unlikely.

The allies kept the emperor in place.

Read the history, the emperor believed Japan could not win the war and wanted to move towards a full negotiated surrender with the only caveat being him being left in place in June which the allies agreed to even and implemented even after the nuclear bombs were dropped. This isn't hindsight the internal documents exist.

Source me then? Because Wiki dont agree with you mate.

"The surrender of Japan was announced by Imperial Japan on August 15 and formally signed on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of World War II to a close. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy was incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. Together with the United Kingdom and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945—the alternative being "prompt and utter destruction". While publicly stating their intent to fight on to the bitter end, Japan's leaders (the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the "Big Six") were privately making entreaties to the still-neutral Soviet Union to mediate peace on terms more favorable to the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Soviets were preparing to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea (in addition to southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) in fulfillment of promises they had secretly made to the United States and the United Kingdom at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

Read all the way through.

The emperor's declaration has the tinge of damage control. His prestige had taken a serious blow, he was literally a god, only a million super weapons could defeat a god. See

I'm not talking about the emperor, I'm talking about Japan would never surrender unconditionally to the allies if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But you said in your post that, and I quote, "The Emperor was maneuvering to surrender fully to allied demands long before the bombs were dropped."

Which the wikipedia article disagrees with, as I said in this post: And there I quoted the article, which you probably didn't read because it was to much text for you, so I can take out the important part for you: "Together with the United Kingdom and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945—the alternative being "prompt and utter destruction". While publicly stating their intent to fight on to the bitter end, Japan's leaders (the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the "Big Six") were privately making entreaties to the still-neutral Soviet Union to mediate peace on terms more favorable to the Japanese."

Thus: Japan would not have surrended unconditionally before Hiroshima and Nagasaki as you said. If you can find me a source who contradicts the wiki article then we can talk.

When will this meme end? The war wasn't won, a blockade leading to mass starvation or an invasion leading to mass slaughter would have been necessary. The blockade could easily get even worse if the fanatical leadership refused unconditional surrender.

>but muh willing to surrender emperor

Meaningless. So long as the military was willing and in control, the war would go on. We're the atom bombs necessary themselves? No, but bombings definitely were and conventional bombs already killed more than both a bombs combined by the time they were used.

I also have to question why exactly civilians aren't to be touched in a war. Does signing a piece of paper and putting on a helmet instead of manufacturing bullets and bombs make you that much more ethically considerable?

>innocent

How?

This. The second one wasnt necessary, and Japan already had no supplies and was firebombed to hell.

The 'saved more lives' than it took thing depends on estimates that we cant ever really know and arent as great as one might think.

The pamphlets werent out yet for the second one if i remember correctly

They were beaten long before.
They just did not know when to surrender
This convinced them

It was a hollow victory

who cares japs deserved it

in 20 years anyone who was alive to witness it will be dead and nobody will care anymore

Why do people get mad when someone is blatantly from /pol/, /leftypol/ or /r9k/?

Shouldn't the diversity of opinions be a good thing for this board? Why does one board deserve to monopolize it?

>Shouldn't the diversity of opinions be a good thing for this board?

No. Diversity of sources is the only good thing on this board.

Glad to see someone else here has read that book.

>its a "oikophobe tries to over play the soviet unions contribution in winning WW2" episode

Ok, I'll preface with the statement that I have not read the book in question, but the statement

>The Soviet Navy's amphibious shipping resources were limited but sufficient to transport the three assault divisions in several echelons

Seems extremely questionable. It took some 4,000+ landing craft to transport about 5 divisions for D-Day. Now, a Soviet division is usually smaller than a western one, but even so, I'd think you'd need close to 2,000 equivalent craft to transport 3 divisions. And the Russians had nowhere near that many landing craft in the Pacific.

They found Japanese soldiers living on islands decades later who thought they were still fighting the war. Without nukes, the war would have dragged out for years with massive casualties on both sides.

On top of that, after taking so many casualties, I doubt the US is as lenient on Japan in the post-war period, preventing it from becoming the economic powerhouse it is today.

Nukes are very, very bad, but peace at the cost of two bombs was worth it. Russia acquiring nuclear technology changed the equation entirely. No country should ever use a nuke again. The risk is too great.