How can Americans justify the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

This. The way I look at it we had 3 main options.

1) Japan is invaded, the Allies must fight their way through waves of not only soldiers, but civilians as well as intelligence had discovered. Massive casualties on both sides.
2) Nation is blockaded, due to Japan's reliance on imports the military and leadership is prioritized in terms of food. Mass starvation ensues.
3) The US bombs two cities, horrifically killing thousands of innocent people but capping it out at that.

I understand why that option is unsavory but it was the best option.

Because they had been fed the lie that if not for the attacks more people would have died in an Invasion of Japan, which is simply not true.

Because the subhuman Japs deserved it.

You really can't find many who don't agree that Japan continuing that war would have resulted in the deaths of millions. The next step for the US was to bombard rail, transport and marine handling facilities with overwhelming air and naval power, and this would have resulted in that year's harvest being blocked from the Japanese population, which even then was surviving on a less than starvation caloric intake. The resulting famine would have dwarfed anything this planet has ever seen.

That war truly had to end in August 1945, or else. What was to come was unspeakable.

>The Japs were willing to fight to the last man
>it would have taken thousands of US lives
Weak propaganda. Are you from 1945? We know that Japanese were not that indoctrined, for example most Kamikaze wrote how absurd their sacrifice was. And we also know that Japan was completely isolated, unabled to feed its population, let alone support the war effort anymore. It was just a matter of time, nothing more, before the defeat, but it wasn't profitable politically, the USA needed a strong "military" victory to face the soviets (and also seize Japan for good).

War is war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both perfectly valid military targets. The atomic bombings were about as justified as they could possibly be and that's really only disputed by contrarian assholes who don't actually know enough about the war to go after more morally questionable incidents like the firebombing of Tokyo or Operation Gomorrah.

Why not? All’s fair in love and war.

/thread

>why didn't the Americans just starve Japan into surrendering without killing anyone

Were the atomic bombs morally any worse than any other killing of civilians? Just larger in scale?

Yes, they were so non-indoctrinated that you had mass suicides in places like Saipan and Okinawa among the civilian population, along with yes, military resistance even among conscripted non-Japanese construction battalions that would often continue until units had suffered 90% casualties or above.

But when they were on Japan proper, it would be different, amirite?

They weren't even larger in scale. Operations like Gomorrah over Hamburg or the firebombings of Tokyo killed more people.

The Japanese had millions of soldiers manning the ramparts to stop the invasion (which would have been in November) and had massed Kamikazes to hit the USN en masse; it would have made Okinawa look like a joke, and the fighting on the ground would have been Eastern Front tier. The only positive outcome to that would be that tankies would no longer be able to claim the Soviets won the whole war by themselves by endlessly pointing to their death count.

The idea the Japanese, whonwer eeven less willing to surrender than the SS, werent going to go down as fanatically as the Nazis did if not moreso is laughable.

So are you saying the United states should have starved out japan and commit basically the largest genocide in history

>attacking the cities of those you're in a state of war with is wrong

Talk shit get hit

by that reasoning you can pretty much justify any war crime and genocide

The difference being that if Japan had surrendered in the first place they wouldn't have been bombed and those deaths could have been avoided.

>you cant nuke 200,000 people to end the war thats evil just stave millions to death

>war crimes are ok because the other side didn't surrender
Why do i even bother replying to americans

I honestly don't know why you're bothering to reply if you can't be bothered to articulate your points.

>it's not okay to kill people to try and win a war after they attacked you

>mass suicides in places like Saipan and Okinawa
Dozen of cases in remoted rural areas, what a "mass" phenomenon. Do you think Toshiro the salaryman in Tokyo would have done the same seriously?

7 decades of propaganda
Only that way.

There were some 10,000 civilian suicides in Saipan alone (Out of a civilian population of about 25,000). Do you have any fucking idea what you're talking about? So yes, I think that Toshiro the Salaryman would be acting similarly

sounds like what the US is doing to North Korea nowdays.

>strategic bombing
>warcrime
Lmfao

Sources say 1000 to 8000, it really smacks of holohoax. Thousands of corpses down a cliff, we should still collect bones nowadays and afaik we don't. Anyway it isn't relevant, Saipan was the literal end of the world, its population was Middle Age tier and there was 2 soldiers for 1 civilian (pressure...), nothing to compare with mainland Japan. Bamboo spear highschool girl squads in seifuku is a myth, the whole population would have just say "wtf they are here? *hands up - watch the soldiers pass - continue job*", because that's what happens in every case.

>it really smacks of holohoax.
In the sense of "I know this is what the sources say but I'm going to ignore it because it doesn't fit with my idiotic biases?" I guess it does.

But nice goalpost shift.

>holohoax
>because that's what happens in every case.
According to people who mention holohoax the SS death squads were used to stop partisans who were causing lots of damage.

>most Kamikaze wrote how absurd their sacrifice was
and then they did it

am I missing something?

You missed the part where a lot of them didn't accomplish the mission because of "malfunction".

Source? As i understand it, kamikaze pilots who came back after an unseccessful mission were generally forced to commit sudoku.

no they just dodged the ships and flew to Tahiti

Tahiti is much too far
Timor is comfier

There's an argument to be made from the side of the American commanders on if to use the bombs and then there's a separate argument of if they really even mattered.

From the American perspective the bombs were made with the intent to be used from the onset. There was little if any doubt that once the Manhattan project churned out a workable atomic bomb that it would be used in a relevant theater ASAP to attempt to end the war.

Separately however, there's little that actually suggests the bombs "ended" the war or was the principle cause that brought Japan to surrender. The Atomic bombs ending the war is told out of narrative convenience like the Stockmarket crash 'causing' the Great Depressions. It works as a very convenient storytelling device to wrap up the chaotic mess of WW2 into easily delineated beginnings and ends. It was a narrative embraced wholeheartedly by both America and Japan for separate reasons. It made America look like an uncontested military superpower and it offered Japan's leaders a way to save face by recasting Japan from imperial aggressors to helpless victims of a new superweapon that nobody could have foreseen.

From a purely strategic perspective the A-bombs were functionally undifferentiated from ordinary firebombing. Japan had been content to weather the destruction of cities because their plans to gain a negotiated peace were unaffected by the bombing of cities. By the time the Abombs were used America was already running out of targets to bomb. If the destruction of cities was what pressed Japan to surrender you'd think they would have surrendered much earlier when it became clear their cities were utterly defenseless. Ultimately the declaration of War by the Soviets wrecked more havoc with Japanese High Command than the Atomic bombs did. It utterly ruined their plan to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated peace with America and simultaneously lost them much of the oversea territory they hoped to hold onto with such a peace.

No
The bombs definitely did a huge part in the surrender process
The devastation and effect from apparently a single weapon to a city was unfathomable at that time
The soviets is a contributing factor but the Japs know that they are limited in navy and the max they could land is 2 division in Hokkaido

It was not a banned weapon.
The restrictions we place on war today and yesterday exist because otherwise conflict follows a logical progression approaching infinite force. The bomb wasn't banned, it's quite good as a bomb, it's not like we're against levelling cities right now, so there's no reason why the individual strategists would decline its use without any other reasons forbidding it.

>The devastation and effect from apparently a single weapon to a city was unfathomable at that time
The JHC were as little impressed as Stalin was. After they first bomb was dropped they even declined to meet as it was not considered to be important enough to justify a summons, but when the Soviets declared war and invaded soon after they met immediately.

You're conflating the immense cultural significance that was mostly formed post-war with the immediate strategic significance and they aren't commensurate.

start shit get hit

We were at war with Japan.

If a war is worth fighting at all, it's worth fighting to the fullest extent of our ability to do so. Any leader who has access to a weapon and refuses to use it against the enemy is basically saying that he values the lives of enemy civilians more than his own soldiers, and that is treason.

And the source for saying soviets were the biggest source for surrender came from a biased jap

Sure the soviets declared war and rolled up the kwantung army in record time but their performance in Sakhalin
Either way Its a combo platter of reason,also what youre forgetting that its not the soviet military performance that scares the japs,its that they see no way to get a mediated peace

I mean we won so we didn't have to justify it.

You say that but Germany never used poison gas in combat in WW2 purely because Hitler himself survived a gas attack in the first war.

How am I 'forgetting' something I explicitly mentioned in my first post. Strategically the A-bombs accomplished nothing greater than what was already being done with diminishing effectiveness due to lack of worthwhile targets each passing day by ordinary saturation bombing which had little to no effect on the JHC's ultimate strategic operations.

Most of the arguments that the bombs "ended" the war rely on specious reasoning (the bombs were dropped and the war ended ergo the bombs ended the war) and taking the Emperor's rhetoric as the final word on the matter.

Because we won? I don't understand what you find so complicated about this.

It's more complicated than that. While I'm sure Hitler's feelings on the issue could have played a part in the decision, the Allies had much more capacity for constructing and deploying chemical weapons than the Germans did, so using them would have been a pandora's box that would have seen the mass gassing of German cities.

Then there's also the issue of effectiveness. I saw some statistics recently about gas casualties in WW1 that showed that despite their use over broad fronts, they generally resulted in surprisingly few casualties and very few deaths compared to the number of men exposed to it.

So if they're faced with potentially devastating retaliatory attacks and its military effectiveness is somewhat dubious, the decision makes a lot more sense.

this
Gas are particularly useful in WW1 with stagnant trenches and lines
Even than it was not a true war winner

Yeah, and look how things turned out for Germany.

Because those fuckers weren't human.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

because it's okay when we do it
the golden rule for every winning party in history

You are basically rejecting the possibility of psychological effects from having an entire city vanish within a few seconds having bearing on their decision to surrender, and I see no reason to believe that. An A-bomb in 1945 is practically like some kind of doomsday science fiction device from a comic book or something. It's well known people have learned to 'deal' with conventional bombing, psychologically, because it takes so long, is so dispersed, and doesn't destroy everything at once. Nukes are instantaneous 'Win' buttons and utterly terrify people.

Also, conventional bombing in the '40s required thousands of bombers carpet bombing an area for an extended period of time. Whereas, you could get the same results instantaneously with a single nuke. That meant Japan's cities were going to be levelled at the same rate the Americans could make A-bombs.

>An A-bomb in 1945 is practically like some kind of doomsday science fiction device from a comic book or something
No its not. The Japanese had their own nuclear program and were well aware of the feasibility of an atomic bomb. While they didn't expect America to have completed one, they were not in the dark about nuclear weapons. As I mentioned earlier the JHC didn't even meet after the first A-bomb was dropped. It simply wasn't seen as an important enough development in the war to justify an immediate meeting whereas the Declaration of War by the Soviets was. If it was as psychologically important to the JHC as you try and make it out to be, you'd expect they would have dropped everything and met immediately, but that's not the case.

>That meant Japan's cities were going to be levelled at the same rate the Americans could make A-bombs.
Japanese cities were already leveled. America was bombing """cities""" of 30,000 people by this point int he war because all the other bigger targets were already so destroyed it was seen as a waste to keep bombing them. The only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still standing were to have targets for a demonstration of the A-bombs.

Again the crux of your argument is to conflate the CULTURAL IMPACT of the Atomic bombs, which were admittedly immense but was something that grew in the post-war, with the STRATEGIC IMPACT which was less than decisive .The Atomic bombs shaped Post-war Japan, but the STORY of the bombs and their towering image as the symbol of Japan's prostate and broken position at the end of the conflict which would grip the Japanese psyche is not commensurate with the strategic impact they made which was not much greater than conventional bombing.

Oh, but it is. Just because scientists all knew it possible at the time didn't make it any less futuristic, or any less terrifying.

So, what, are you arguing that if they just kept dropping bombs but the Soviets never invaded, the Japanese would have just stood there letting themselves get vaporized until the Americans showed up to burn them out of the mountains (the only places they could hide, though not survive, given they had no food)?

>tfw you realize the major ideological relic of humanist philosophy in modern society is the belief that certain humans "aren't human"

I know many people are arguing about the reason but to my understanding it goes like this:

pre-reason: America had the option of island hopping like japan did except japan had many islands set up in ambush. General Douglas McArthur went around and skipped many of these island.

Understood Reason: America had realized that the Japanese would not surrender and in turn calculated that the amount of casualties suffered from both sides would be greater than the amount of deaths from an Nuclear blast. The second bomb was an attempt to knock sense into the Japanese after the first drop.

in a fucked up thought the bombs actually "saved lives" in theory. And after the mass raping and murder the Japanese committed on the Chinese and Filipinos it wasn't bad morally.

to my last post. The suffered casualties would be from invading Japan my apologies

>So, what, are you arguing that if they just kept dropping bombs but the Soviets never invaded, the Japanese would have just stood there letting themselves get vaporized
They would have stayed the exact same course they were on before the Soviets declared war: prepare for a tenacious defense of the home islands and bleed America into a negotiated peace when they tried to invade. Japan was already 'standing there letting themselves get vaporized' by conventional bombing and they had done so well at it that America hardly had anything left to target. What do you think is left to get 'vaporized' at this point in the war you dumb fuck?

America was already intent on invading and without the Soviet declaration of war signalling the death knell of the Japanese strategy an invasion would have happened and the Japanese strategy would have gone right ahead as it was planned.

You're forgetting it wasn't the Military that gave up because of the nukes, it was the Emperor. The Emperor could not bear to see thousands upon thousands of civilians get inexorably erased.

The Military wasn't going to give it up, that is true. But they were goddamn psychos. The Emperor was too sheltered to have such a mindset, and his will was more easy to break.

The entire idea that the Soviets caused the Japanese to surrender is a lie cooked up confluence of interests.

First, by Japanese who want to shift the blame for surrender onto a country that did almost nothing for the Pacific War effort but was powerful enough it doesn't make them look weak for that being the reason, thus allowing them to dismiss all their defeats at the hands of the USA and try to shed their embarrassment from it, and try to claim some kind of symbolic half-victory by claiming the country that did the overwhelming majority of the work to defeat Japan wasn't actually the one who defeated Japan.

The second, obviously, are the Russians, because "fuck America" and getting credit for destroying the Nazis just isn't enough for them, apparently.

Well I mean, weren't the crates delivered with the gas state that they were only to be opened and used under the Fuhrer's direct orders?

>The Emperor could not bear to see thousands upon thousands of civilians get inexorably erased.
No I'm pretty certain he could stand it which is why Japan didn't surrender after 170,000 of his citizens got burned to a crisp in Tokyo by firebombs. Or why he didn't surrender the moment it became clear all of Japan's cities were sitting ducks to day & night bombing raids.

>The entire idea that the Soviets caused the Japanese to surrender is a lie cooked up confluence of interests.

No, the idea comes from actually examining the Japanese strategy at the time and seeing what a massive fucking wrench the Soviet declaration of war was to a policy that hinged on using the Soviets as a neutral mediator to achieve its objectives.

Your entire argument doesn't even TOUCH Japanese strategy you just keep insisting on the "psychological aspect" being definitive when there isn't concrete material evidence to back up the decisive impact you're trying to make it out to be.

And just who the absolute fuck would we ever need to justify this to?

Because it wasn't the Military that decided to surrender, and if we're talking "concrete evidence", the Emperor never cited the Soviets as his reason for giving up. You can accuse him of lying of course but, you could never prove it.

God
The world
Your victims
All the other countries you uphold to better standards
Your national conscience (you don't have one anyway)

Pick one

> Emperor never cited the Soviets as his reason for giving up.
>Most of the arguments that the bombs "ended" the war rely on specious reasoning (the bombs were dropped and the war ended ergo the bombs ended the war) and taking the Emperor's rhetoric as the final word on the matter.

Japs started it, wouldn't surrender, got killed. It's called reaping what you sow. You can't go around burning down and slaughtering half of China and attacking everyone around you and then bitch about getting blasted in oblivion by every weapon your opponents have.

Well since the military wasn't going to give up, it was the Emperor's decision, and you can't prove he was lying, you can either take him at his word or choose to believe otherwise because...giving America credit is anathema to some people, so they'll take any opportunity to do it.

It's not about 'lying' or not you idiot. It's about weighing more factors than the Emperor's rhetoric in a radio address to his people announcing the surrender. The radio address was an emotional and calculated appeal announcing a historic end to Imperial Japan, not a disinterested and rational examination of the ultimate causes of Japanese surrender.

The best argument you could make for the bombs is that they gave additional cover to the peace faction in Japan to press their weight after the Military faction's plans went bust after the Soviet Declaration of war.

It's also not about 'giving someone credit'. America obviously fought and won the Pacific War. What I'm arguing is the strategic efficacy of the bombs themselves in causing the Japanese surrender. I think if you weren't so personally interested in America's reputation and took an objective examination of the Strategic situation preceding the surrender you'd have to admit the Soviet Declaration upset that strategic calculus to a much greater degree than the A-bombs which accomplished little more than what was already being done with conventional bombing.

>invade
>millions of soldiers die
>tens of millions of civilians die
Or
>bomb two cities, couple hundred thousand die

The bomb being used then prevented nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. The world needed to see the atom bomb so that it would never again be put to use.

>The bomb being used then prevented nuclear annihilation during the Cold War
Nah, America's refusal to use them in the Korean War is what ultimately set Nuclear Weapons apart from conventional weaponry. If Truman listened to MacArthur Nuclear Weapons would be seen as fair-game.

Not him but how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that somehow you can hold out against the most powerful country on earth, because 'at least the Soviets aren't attacking'? I mean they couldn't even ship shit from Korea and Manchuria anymore because submarines had taken over the Sea of Japan. I don't even get how the Soviets factor into it, given the Soviets didn't have the ability to invade Japan, and their threat to industry in Korea/China was, as stated, irrelevant because of the sub blockade.

America expected so many casualties from the planned invasion of Japan that they stocked up on purple heart medals.

There were so many people are still being awarded them to this day

>Not him but how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that somehow you can hold out against the most powerful country on earth
Nigger that was the Japanese High Command entire strategy. It wasn't about "winning" the war at this point, it was about putting up a tenacious defense of the home island and bleeding America in the hopes of securing a negotiated peace as opposed to an unconditional surrender.

The Japanese hoped to use the Soviets as a counterweight to America by having them mediate the peace so when the Soviets declared war and overran Manchuria the Japanese instantly lost 1. their hopes at achieving a mediated peace and 2. all the overseas territory they hoped to keep with a peace.

See :

>"We're all gonna die but at least the Russians aren't helping yet"

Ironically, arguing something as stupid and irrelevant as THAT was the basis of their desire to keep fighting makes the Japanese look even worse.

>"Our enemies are weak, they cannot stomach a fight"
>gets rekt in all-out annihilation combat
>says the exact same thing while on the verge of total catastrophe

Truly the ISIS of the 1940s.

I know man, its like saying Hans the accountant and Greta the housewife and Magda the factory worker are going to kill themselves because they lost and Hitler is dead...

>We'll break their resistance
>It'll end the conflict faster
Has been the justification for countless war crimes.

Because the civilian toll would have been doubled if an invasion had occurred, the Japanese had prepared their entire population to die like animals for some stupid cause, this was better for Japan as a nation infrastructure wise, and also from a human perspective.

If this is your argument you have to prove the bombs were the reason Japan surrendered

In hindsight due to the issues with radioactivity, yes. At the time, no, Firebombings were more lethal.

If they had taken out kyoto, they might not have needed two. But the insane fucking japs didn't even want to surrender after two because of muh emperor.

propaganda pic, people murdered by the Hunnic bandits, Austrians welcomed their Aryan liberators from the Judeo-Hitlerite menace in masses

>God
US is God
>The world
The world answers to the US, not the other way around
>Your victims
Vae Victus
>All the other countries you uphold to better standards
See everything above
>Your national conscience
>(you don't have one anyway)
You answered that yourself.

The ends justify the means, desu.

Japs aren't human

We would have killed far more americans AND japs had we tried to invade the mainland

Definitely agree except for
>And after the mass raping and murder the Japanese committed on the Chinese and Filipinos it wasn't bad morally.
In no way does that make it more moral, random peasants were killed because of the actions of some IJA niggers. And you can't even argue that they were condoning it like German civilians were, since these civilians were neither in the proximity of the crimes nor did they even put the culprits in power like the Germans did. Hence why Japs were not treated as harshly as the Germans afterwards.

>put the culprits in power like the Germans did
Nazis weren't elected, they played the system and then squashed the opposition with brute force.

Because that's how we roll. Sunday morning attack was paid back in full.

>Objectively fucking false.

>he doesn't know that the bombings were a freemason genocide directed towards catholic nips