Was it the right thing to do, Veeky Forums?

The mission of a commander is to win the war with as few casualties as possible. American commanders fulfilled their mission.
There would have been even more deaths on both sides if the war continued.
Also remember that Japan started the war, and they treated prisoners and civilians like shit, to say the least.

A blockade has rather catastrophic consequences for civilians, as the depleting food supply is reserved for the army and the elite. Famine and sickness would have taken an even bigger toll than two atomic bombing.

You'd expect the civilians to rebel, right?

in Shōwa Japan ? Sure !

We could have invaded Korea
Pretty sure it entails "not nuking civilian population centers"
Pretty much. And the beginning of the "US" economic empire.
Why would you think there would be food shortages and famine? Japan had a shortage of materiel for waging war-petroleum, steel, rubber, but not food.
>we can't blockade, it'll hurt civilians
>so we'll nuke the civilians in their cities instead

>Was the holocaust wrong?

It's not something that can be properly answered now.

The times, ideals and peoples that cradled the holohoax were its causes and contributors, and its not something we can look at from a revisionist point of view. The way people thought and saw the world then was very different as was the world itself, and I would say its something that fits in pretty neatly to what you would expect in the end of the beginning of modern warfare.

Japan was facing imminent starvation user. New to the thread, but this is common knowledge.

google.com/amp/s/ghb67.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/operation-starvation/amp/?client=safari

>Though the Japanese prioritized food shipments, the average caloric intake fell 12% below the minimum daily requirement for the non-farming population by 1944

And that's before the widespread rail and canal destruction campaigns in 45 itself.

>nuke a few thousand civilians
>to prevent a few million civilians from starving to death, throwing themselves at tanks armed with knives and hand grenades, or throwing themselves off cliffs.

That's the reality of the decision.

DoD please go.
>an American campaign of starvation
Your argument isn't working because the thread is about "was dropping the nuke the right thing to do", you're saying the nuke was necessary in order to break the Japanese to save them from the starvation we incurred on them. If anything you're digging a deeper hole.

Maybe not, but it was the correct thing to do

DoD?

>Japan had a shortage of materiel for waging war-petroleum, steel, rubber, but not food.
>but not food

My grandma ate grass and worms for 2 months and is 4'10" because of it. Most of her class starved to death on the island they were sent to for protection from the bombing raids.

>you're saying the nuke was necessary in order to break the Japanese to save them from the starvation we incurred on them.

Well, ummm, yeah

Checked

maybe those chinks shouldn't of attacked hawaii then

Department of Defense
Sounds awful, thankfully the war ended and she went back to her diet of seaweed and raw fish.
I feel like you're missing the irony in your post.

>killing innocent civilians can be justified

instead, US dropped two on Japs, Soviets claimed North Korea and Manchuria.

wew

If it ends a war then its always justified. Imagine how much wars in the ME would end if we just blew up some towns as a threat to the taliban assholes to give it a rest.

>Your argument isn't working because the thread is about "was dropping the nuke the right thing to do",

Yes, precisely.

You've got, as I see it, 4 options.

A) Invade and conquer Japan.
B) Drop the Nukes
C) Blockade.
D) Negotiate and forego total victory.

All of them have their costs, measured in lives. B almost certainly has the lowest cost; as negotiating allows for the Japanese to keep some pieces of their empire and all the rapaciousness that goes with it.

I mentioned the article to rebut the claim mentioned in this postBecause yes, there would be food shortages and famine. That will kill people, probably a hell of a lot of people, more than the bomb will kill.

Since it was the one that yielded the lowest body count and achieved the necessary political long-term conditions to prevent re-outbreaks of violence, dropping the bomb was the right choice.

t o t a l w a r

I think you're the one that's missing the logic.

Option 1
>Continue blockade
>Food situation gets worse
>Starvation ensues
>Millions of Japanese civilians die
>War continues for months on end

Option 2
>Drop bombs
>Japan quickly and swiftly surrenders
>American occupation comes in
>Helps the reconstruction and relief of Japan much like the US was doing to Germany
>Provides food for the civilians
>Millions of Japanese civilians don't die from starvation

>innocent

"Right" thing to do is totally subjective.

It was justified and reasonable though. But if you're an American like myself who believes dropping the bombs was justified, you have to admit that had Midway gone differently and Japan was on the verge of invading the US and had atomic weapons and dropped them on Seattle and Portland instead of invading to end the war. Can you accept that? I have.

>you have to admit that had Midway gone differently and Japan was on the verge of invading the US and had atomic weapons and dropped them on Seattle and Portland instead of invading to end the war

That doesn't even begin to make sense.

it doesn't really matter either way but in hindsight, it seems like it was the right choice

yeah it does

more people died from the fire bombings

I forgot "...it would be justifiable as well." At the end of the sentence. Does that help? Or does your nationalism render you incapable of discerning reason and justice?

it makes perfect sense wtf

No, it doesn't.

Midway going differently doesn't give the Japanese the capacity to invade the U.S., what with the enormous levels that the Americans outproduced them and the lack of bases nearby to support said invasion. Hell, they never would have even been able to invade Honolulu, let alone the continental U.S.

The Japanese never had atomic weapons, and were never close to developing them. Even if they did somehow get them (manufactured from what?), they had no delivery system comparable to a B-29 that could carry something as bulky as a 1st gen nuke.

Nuking Seattle or Portland would almost certainly not knock the U.S. out of the war, because the American strategic situation is in no way comparable to the Japanese one of "completely beyond fucked but refusing to admit it" even if the Pacific fleet vanished into thin air and the Japanese were raiding the coasts.

Your hypothetical is incredibly retarded.

>your hypothetical is incredibly retarded

Yet, you seem not to know what a hypothetical situation is. Incredible. I knew autistic people have trouble with hypotheticals, but damn.

>Not knowing what Total War is.

No, I get what you're going for, you're claiming that the decision to employ a brutally destructive weapon against a civilian population is equally justified no matter who is dropping it on whom. Which is fine, and evenhanded, although I think the question has a bit more nuance than you're giving it.

You then tried to illustrate this with something you pulled out of your ass which quite clearly demonstrates you have no fucking clue how the Pacific war worked, which in turn, makes your judgment extremely questionable.

Because the justification for ANY action is going to be grounded in the question of "what are the reasonable alternatives", which are necessarily going to be heavily based in the facts on the ground at a specific time and place. When considering the justification of the atomic bombing, you have to measure the costs and benefits to everyone affected by alternatives like "invade" or "blockade" or "just let it hang and get some non-total victory".

You can't so easily invert a very complicated political, military, and economic situation like that, and the fact that you did so, and then ducked behind "hypothetical", screams retardation. In this hypothetical, there's no possibility of blockade or invasion, since both are outside of Japan's reach. But why does Japan need this total victory? What makes it worth killing innocent people over? At least a lot of U.S. reasoning was to avoid the necessity of clearing out places like the DEI and what's now Vietnam by force. What subjected populations were the Americans holding in thrall that the Japanese wanted to liberate? How time critical was this anyway? Why didn't you stop and think about this shit?

>he seriously unironically thinks that Japan would have had the capability to invade the continental US let alone even Hawaii

We outpaced their war production by literally 100x per month and the disparity would have only gotten greater.

The Japanese were disciplined and united to the point of fanaticism and I think even if they did somehow rally during and after Midway it would've been for naught.

For you see, provoking the richest and most heavily industrialized country on the world with a population 10x your own with a certain event that happened 75 years ago to the day was a BAD FUCKING IDEA.

And the thing most of the smarter Japanese brass feared was just that: galvanizing the entire population of the US into war and severely pissing us off.

You understood the main thrust of his hypothetical, why does whether or not his hypothetical circumstances could have existed mean anything? It was just a thought exercise, not a 'what if' attempt at alternate history.

He's just saying accepting bombing Japan was right in those circumstances means that if, and it's irrelevant whether those circumstances could have existed in world war 2, you have to accept that it would be right for a foreign power to bomb the US in similar circumstances, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Yes because it allowed the world to see just how destructive the bombs were. I'm pretty sure it was a big reason why they weren't used in the cold war

Did you guys know that Operation Market Garden was a success?

His hypothetical doesn't work, though -- he failed to create an analogous situation. The US is an enormous country with a much larger and less concentrated population than Japan and a much larger economy and production base. The Japanese wouldn't be invading a nearly-exhausted, war-torn, demoralized country that was still stubbornly resisting despite being on the brink of collapse. The alternative to dropping two atomic bombs wouldn't be "a massive bombing campaign that would without question kill more people overall," because America's just too huge for that to work -- what, are the Japanese supposed to fly bombers over to Chicago and New York? And it's immensely unlikely that as many American civilians would die in a Japanese invasion of the American mainland as Japanese civilians would die in the reverse scenario.

The point is, dropping two bombs on civilian targets in America wouldn't accomplish anything; it wouldn't shock America into surrendering, as it did with the Japanese. It'd just be straight-up murder of tens of thousands of people for literally no strategic purpose.

If we ignore that, and pretend that America is the same size as Japan and just as ready to cave in as 1945 Japan, then dropping the bombs STILL wouldn't be right, because America would be fighting a purely DEFENSIVE WAR -- the Japanese attack was an unprovoked act of aggression, after all. Dropping two bombs to make a country surrender "for the greater good" is a lot harder to justify when you attacked them because you're fuckers, basically, and they're fighting for their survival.

But -- it'd be less bad than an outright invasion / carpet bombing campaign would be.

Of course, the Japanese should be grateful that we nuked them. Saved millions of lives by doing so.

It's also worth noting that 1. America surrendering wouldn't bring an immediate end to a destructive war in a third country (the Japanese-Soviet war in Manchuria) and wouldn't stop an invasion and occupation of America by one of Japan's allies that would unquestionably have been worse (the averted Soviet invasion of Japan). There's really just no parallel here at all.

>doublethink

Good goy.

Drop the nukes:
>few hundred thousand civilians die
>unconditional surrender of Japan
>US restabilizes Japan as a buffer state against the spread of communism
>Japanese economy flourishes until the 90's

Don't drop the nukes:
>US invades from the south, with USSR likely invading through the north
>begin the "race to Tokyo" a la "race to Berlin"
>millions of Japanese and American casualties
>millions of Japanese civilian deaths through collateral damage, inadequate resistance, or suicide
>USSR and US meet in Tokyo
>repeat: Germany
>Japan is split into communist north and capitalist south
>South Japan flourishes due to US aid
>North Japan becomes USSR puppet shithole
>possible war in near future similar to Korea

Seems like we did the right thing, for us and Japan.

Kek.

Have you read ANY quotes from the people involved in the war?

>"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

t.Headcannon.

THE ONLY reason they used the nukes was they had just developed a NEW BILLION dollar weapon which needed to be used.

But yeah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were such huge war priories (Nagasaki wasn't even the fucking original target, the original target was obscured, by bomb smoke (go figure) so they nuked Nagasaki)

Like, it's nothing new. Almost all the people who spearheaded the war spoke against the use of the nukes in Japan, as the Japanese were all but defeated - some have even said they were simply looking for a way to surrender without losing face.

I mean, these are the people WHO WON THE WAR WHO SAY IT WAS USELESS.

(You) will say it is not.

Who do I trust? Admirals and Generals? Or Anonymous of 2k16?

Berlin in 1945.

Tokyo in 1945.

Would have been exactly the same, right?

>with USSR likely invading through the north

This actually might be my single biggest pet peeve in all of history study.

The USSR's plan to invade Hokkaido had, as step 1

>Borrow some ships from the U.S.

It's not happening unless and until the U.S. allows it. Which they probably won't.

Not an argument. Nukes were the only way to end the war quickly with the least amount of deaths.

Buttmad generals pissed off they're not as useful as a gravity-bomb. Also, no sources.

(you)

Yes
Considering that banging out a peace treaty beforehand was highly unlikely, as well as the alternatives of either starving them out or planning a land invasion, both of which would cause a significant loss of life, using an experimental weapon capable a vaporizing tens of thousands of people in one fell swoop was preferable.

Here's a question I've been meaning to ask that tangentially related to the use new 'horrible' weapons in warfare.

Was death by Poison Gas in WW1 any more inhumane than being shredded by machine guns or shrapnel? I read in Fussel's The Great War and Modern Memory a line that casually mentioned that Gas was the most humane weapon introduced to warfare but was condemned immediately because nobody had gotten used to it like bullets and shells.

>Considering that banging out a peace treaty beforehand
What are you even talking about? The entire thing was because the US wanted an "unconditional surrender" (but we promise the royal family will be ok) and not have to bang out a peace treaty. Japan was already willing to surrender, they were just fighting about terms.

xD

>Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

looks like google earth from when they only had some of the buildings in major cities in 3D

>MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."

>Japan was already willing to surrender
>won't accept the terms
nigga how is that surrender?

>we don't want to surrender if it means getting rid of emperor
>dropsnukes.jpeg
>okaywesurrender.png
>cool, the emperor can stay, fyi.

The terms were no terms? What?

Japan was willing to do a conditional surrender. The Allies demanded an unconditional surrender, but they gave into a condition anyways and the surrender was just unconditional in name.

You're talking about the guy that wanted to invade China 6 years later. Also he lost the Philippines like a bitch.

His opinion? Discarded.

Well shit, now I just don't know.

This. The man has proven to be a bonafide retard, why would his opinion matter at all?

Way to conviently leave out the part where they wanted to keep territories they had conquered

Oh, you mean like literally every other defeated nation who conquered land?

Not even him, but are you thick?

There's a difference between the two, being the state of power and the relationship between the victor and vanquished. The victorious power not performing every injury within its power doesn't mean that there was a condition put upon the surrender.

What's next? The CSA only conditionally surrendered to the Union because their leadership weren't hanged as criminals?

Besides, Japanese surrender terms, at least what they floated to the USSR as mediators, also included them keeping Korea and Indochina and certain concessions within China itself, as well as what's now Taiwan, which was viewed as a separate political entity. Material differences did exist.

Yeah, that's why Germany kept all of Poland and half of the Ukraine and Belarus after WW1!

Are you trying to imply they didn't want to?

totally
however maybe more gooks would have been killed if they just kept fighting

>a small concession with basically zero impact (leaving the emperor) means it wasn't unconditional surrender

You're losing bruh. Time to bail the thread.

I'm implying that victorious third parties can and often do strip their vanquished enemies of their own conquests.

Hence, Japan's offer that kept them in control of places like Malaya, and the U.S. holding out for them to cough them up, actually was a pretty significant material development, and it wasn't just "Hurr emperor that they let stay around anyway"

lol

There's a difference between being unwilling to surrender and keeping the war on because you want different peace terms.

Again, you are yet to explain how this is any different from any other nation out there who conquered land and was later defeated, they all want to keep their lands but they are all talked out of it or forced via other means, they aren't nuked into nothing.

What you are saying does not fit the context of your argument as reasonings for the nukes.

If MacArthur was not even consulted for his advice on dropping the bomb it means the decision was pure political, not a military decision.

That is the only point that matters.

>What you are saying does not fit the context of your argument as reasonings for the nukes.

Are you literally retarded? Of course it does. You have two powers at war. They disagree over the terms of surrender. The stronger power applies more force to get the weaker power to comply with its wishes. It isn't different from literally any other war where there were quibbling over the exact terms of bowing out.

I wasn't trying to argue that the nukes were or weren't exceptional. I was simply pointing out an error in the factual claim here that "defeated nations who conquered land" always get to keep it. They don't; and it's a fairly common demand from a victorious power.

The reason the nukes were dropped was to force the Japanese to accept a surrender agreement that was acceptable to the Allies (really the U.S.)

>or forced via other means,

Yeah, like getting the crap kicked out of them.

>they aren't nuked into nothing.

The Japanese weren't "nuked into nothing". Two bombs were dropped that killed fewer people than had already been killed in conventional bombings.

Soviets never were anywhere near capable of invading Hokkaido.

>If MacArthur was not even consulted for his advice on dropping the bomb it means the decision was pure political, not a military decision.

You do realize that there was no overall single commander of the Pacific, and that MacArthur was vigorously opposed as a candidate to even lead the invasion of Japan, yes? Thomas Farrell and William Purnell WERE consulted, and they were the guys who had the most experience with the air force and the bomb. Why bring in MacArthur's opinion into the matter and not the guys who have experience more directly related with what you're going to do?

>and they were the guys who had the most experience with the air force and the bomb.

why do these people with direct interests in the creation of the bomb want the bomb to be used? And demonstrated?

>Why bring in MacArthur's opinion into the matter and not the guys who have experience more directly related with what you're going to do?

Why have a 5-star military general if you are not going to use him for advice?

Why would you not accept the advice of the man who was essentially in charge of Japanese/US relations at the time? Isn't it obvious people were asked whom the president knew he could trust to profess the need for the atomic bomb?

I mean, he's only General MacArthur.

>What you are saying does not fit the context of your argument as reasonings for the nukes.

>unconditional surrender or be destroyed
>no
>get destroyed and unconditionally surrender
>we decided to allow you to keep the emperor for social stability as long as he explains he is not a god

Unconditional surrender doesn't mean the victor can't hand everything back to the loser. It means that all the power to determine the war result goes to the victor.

None of this makes it "right". You know, the purpose of this thread?

Unless of course you are trying to take the intellectually lazy standpoint which is might is right.

Except the assurances were made before the actual surrender.

>why do these people with direct interests in the creation of the bomb want the bomb to be used

What direct interests are those?

>Why have a 5-star military general if you are not going to use him for advice?

Do you understand how compartmentalized a military is? They didn't ask MacArthur's opinion on

>Level bombing Japan with conventional weapons
>Operation Starvation and all the aerial mining of Japan's harbors
>The submarine operations around Japan.

Were all of those mere political stunts too?

>Why would you not accept the advice of the man who was essentially in charge of Japanese/US relations at the time?

He wasn't in charge of the Japanese-U.S. relations at the time. He was in charge of the Southwest Pacific Theater, which by the way, didn't actually include Japan itself, although they did bring him in on planning (mostly logistical issues) for Olympic and he was the first choice to command such an operation.

>I mean, he's only General MacArthur.

Yes, General MacArthur of the US Army. Which is why when conducting a USAAF strike, they didn't bother bringing him in, like they did for any of their other strikes.

>kill civilians
>taliban dont care
>use it to continue their jihad
amazing desu

Truman knew that MacArthur was a politically inept general who only happened to be popular enough to not be sacked after his defeats. Macarthur could have been a 20 star general, but why would Truman have to ask a failure for his advice?

"Right" is not the topic of the thread. OP clearly says "justified" instead.

The formal surrender? Okay. That's meaningless and pendantic.
The de-facto surrender occurred when the Japs agreed to unconditionality.

If you are going to argue formalities, then the US won the Vietnam war.

Here is what you are doing.

>let's ignore the advice of the man who won the pacific theatre for us

Like I mean, you can argue all you want. Nothing you have said is actually touching on the point, simply said "why would they".

I just don't know. I am not arguing any point of view of my own. Simply expressing the opinions of the peoples who won the war, who spent time with The Japanese in the time leading up to 1915.
Ignorance at it's finest.

I mean, you can't even read.
>essentially in charge of..
>he was not!
Why bother?

>but why would Truman have to ask a failure for his advice?

To save himself from one of the biggest blunders in the modern world? Only Americans (and Chinese) hold the point of view which you do, are you aware of that?

>let's ignore the advice of the man who won the pacific theatre for us

That sure as hell isn't MacArthur. Nimitz has a much better claim if you want to reduce something as large and complex as the Pacific War to one person "winning it".

>Nothing you have said is actually touching on the point,

Yes it is, if you had an IQ that made it into the triple digits. Militaries are large, complex, bureaucratic organizations that don't always have everyone on the same page. They didn't ask MacArthur, because they asked other people, who were much more directly involved in both strategic bombardment and the atomic bomb, about what would be the probable effects of the atomic bomb being delivered in a strategic bombing strike.

This isn't a surprise to anyone, except you for some bizarre reason, who apparently thinks MacArhtur should have been involved in everything.

> I am not arguing any point of view of my own.

Retard.

>it means the decision was pure political, not a military decision.

That is a stance that you are arguing. Badly, I might add. If the decision to not consult MacArthur about possible effects makes it a "political and not a military decision", then you are left with the inescapable conclusion that all naval and strategic bombing operations were "political and not military decisions".

>he was not!

He wasn't. Where was MacArthur at the Potsdam declaration? The august 12th response to Japan's offer of another conditional surrender was written by James Byrnes, not MacArthur. He quite literally wasn't in charge of "Japanese/U.S. relations", what he was in charge of was the Southwest Pacific Theater of Operations. He didn't set policy, he executed it. That's what happens in civilian run democratic nations.

Yep