Vorkosigan

Also the long argument in this thread about means and ends: terrorists always think their means justify their ends. They don't. Whether at least trying to limit our aggression to traditional military targets would have resulted in greater loss of life is speculative. That we murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including children, is not. It was wrong.

Of course it was wrong, but that was never the issue. It would have been even more amoral to have permitted the war to drag on for several more years, killing millions in the process. I suppose not committing terrorism is more important to you than the lives of millions.

Do the numbers yourself: 50-100,000 Chinese died every week of the conflict. If it drags on another month, you've already exceeded A-bomb casualties. It was certainly an act of terror, but critics of it -- who are, in my opinion, dupes of Japanese facism when not its active proponents -- have never come up with a credible alternative scenario. Unless you can come up with a credible alternative -- and please do not give me that "they were going to surrender" nonsense, that was never the case -- then you have no basis for your bizarre attack here.

Vorkosigan

echidna

If WWII had been fought by the Allies using the morality of 2003, this website wouldn’t be in English.

echidna

In fact, this website wouldn't be.

Godbert

Originally posted by Vorkosigan

It was certainly an act of terror, but critics of it -- who are, in my opinion, dupes of Japanese facism when not its active proponents -- have never come up with a credible alternative scenario.

isn't that cute! Good to see that people can still get so irrationally passionate about defending an act of terrorism


Unless you can come up with a credible alternative -- and please do not give me that "they were going to surrender" nonsense, that was never the case -- then you have no basis for your bizarre attack here.


Ok: drop the bomb in some well visible but sparsely populated part of the woods - same (if not better - see tunguska meteorite) effect without killing everyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You could even give them an ultimatum and say that your second bomb will be bigger and be dropped on hundredthousands of civilians (doesn't even sound good in this context, does it?) - then the blame would really be on the japanese if they wouldn't surrender.

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Godbert
[B]Originally posted by Vorkosigan
Vork: It was certainly an act of terror, but critics of it -- who are, in my opinion, dupes of Japanese facism when not its active proponents -- have never come up with a credible alternative scenario.

Godbert: isn't that cute! Good to see that people can still get so irrationally passionate about defending an act of terrorism

See Bruce Lee's Marching Orders. The Magic intercepts of Japanese codes laying out the postwar strategy of attempting to convince humanitarians and leftists that the Bomb was an act of terrorism. See the September 1945 intercepts, I believe the critical intercept was September 15, but haven't read the book in a while. See also any book by any "revisionist." Van Wolferen lays this out in some detail in The Enigma of Japanese Power. See also some of the discussion in McCormack's The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. Another good book to read on the subject of Japanese facism is Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy. Don't you think it is rather interesting that the US Left has adopted the position of the Japanese Right?

And please, in the future, before you post to a thread like this, do your reading. People who want to take the moral high ground best first put on some serious climbing boots.

Ok: drop the bomb in some well visible but sparsely populated part of the woods - same (if not better - see tunguska meteorite) effect without killing everyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You could even give them an ultimatum and say that your second bomb will be bigger and be dropped on hundredthousands of civilians (doesn't even sound good in this context, does it?) - then the blame would really be on the japanese if they wouldn't surrender.

This was thought of, discussed and rejected at the time (do you think that nobody thought of this?). Do you know why? We have 20-20 hindsight, and know that the Bomb brought about the end of the war. Nobody had any way of knowing if the Japanese would actually surrender if confronted with genocide. Remember also that there were only three bombs available at that time (the nuke threat of genocide was bluff; we could not have carried it out). Also, the Bomb was not responsible for one mission but several, all of which, as I have pointed out, conflicted. For example, Hiroshima had to be obliterated, since it was a major military target, the HQ of the army assigned to defend Kyushu from the Allied invasion, the major port in the area, whose population was one-third soldiers. Some planners wanted to make that the device, even if it failed to end the war, would still have some positive military effect. Hiroshima, as you have divined, was almost too far from Tokyo to make an effective demonstration, although it was an important city in the scheme for the invasion planning.

As it turns out, your solution failed anyway, because the government did not surrender after the first bomb on a city. So why do you think that bombing a desolate area would work, when wiping out a city failed?

Of course it was terrorism. What other choices were left to us? Japan was already starting to suffer from starvation; the US had plans to bomb the rice crop in the event of an invasion. The death toll would have been appalling. The island had no functioning economy, the Navy was destroyed, the Merchant Marine sunk, the ports mined and useless, millions of its men were dispersed around the Pacific slowly dying (on some islands 75% of enlisted men starved to death in the period between surrender and the arrival of US troops), the industrial base had shrunk to nothing, and its cities were bombed out and destroyed. And yet still the Japanese would not surrender! How to end the conflict was a vexing problem for the Allies that admits of no easy solution. Apparently there are some in this thread who think it better to let the war drag on and on, and letting millions die.

Vorkosigan

exile

Vorkosigan

Some people, when presented with this dilemma:-

1. I do something (bomb Hiroshima, attack Iraq, etc) and 100,000 people die

2. I do nothing and 1 million people die

will take option 2 on the basis that the 1 million deaths will (ostensibly) not be directly due to their actions.

seanie

Assuming you're not clairvoyant you still have to make an assessment about the likely outcome of your action or lack of it.

Sometimes that may be straightforward, sometimes not. That renders the problem rather more nuanced than you've indicated.

1. I do something (bomb Hiroshima, attack Iraq, etc) and 100,000 people might die.

2. I do nothing and 1 million people mightdie.

3. But then again they might not.

4. So how many actual deaths am I willing to inflict to save how many possible deaths. And what is the likelihood of those possible deaths set against the likelihood of actual deaths due to my actions.

Such considerations can weigh heavily.

Vorkosigan

Seanie, considering that there was fighting on Okinawa as late as 1947, and men remained in caves on Iwo Jima for five years, living like troglodytes in the darkness, and there were millions of Japanese troops in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere, how many do you think would have died in the event of a non-drop?

Since there was never any plan to surrender, as the US knew from its intercepts of Japanese diplomatic codes, please explain how the war would have ended -- Japanese troops laying down their arms quietly all over the Empire. Remember that the Japanese military was so against surrender that key members of the Imperial family had to be dispatched to various places in the Empire to quell local commanders who wanted to fight on (several of them wanted to establish independent states in order to do so).

Bear in mind that the US planned to invade Japan. Bear in mind that the Nazi invasion of Russia resulted in something like 30 million dead in lightly populated European Russia. In 1946 the US was going to dump 5 million heavily armed combat troops into the middle of the densest urban agglomeration on the planet, the Kanto Plain. The likely death toll from that defies imagination, but the overall civilian death toll would likely have exceeded 25 million, or one-third of the population (similar proportions were obtained in Okinawa and Saipan). As a comparison, there were half a million in Stalingrad prior to the war. After the war, the registration survey found only 5,000 who had lived in the city prior to 1941. All the rest were dead. And that doesn't count the 2 million fighting men who perished there, and the hundreds of thousands of refugees. And all this does not take into account the continued cost of occupation and fighting elsewhere in Asia, particularly China.

The final figure of course is not clear, but there is no uncertainty about the question that millions were going to die.

Vorkosigan

echidna

I'm not going to match Vork's detail, but also bear in mind the Allied perception of military fanatacism embodied by the Kamikaze movement and other Japanese military culture of ritual suicide, Hari Kari. Today the fanatacism of Sept 11 shocks us, but late WWII saw this tactic as common-place and still commands respect for those pilots' sense of duty. Even today, the WWII Japanese military's uncommon sense of duty stands as an leading example of military dedication. They were never going to be an enemy which would capitulate as easily as others.

While it's easier to think of the Japanese in terms of cutesy Tamaguchi toys today, things were a little different after being embroiled in 5 years of war.

Maybe the cushioned luxury of hindsight suggests options. We'll never know, but faced with the same information & the same capabilities, there is little to suggest it was as wrong as many pacifists would like to believe.

echidna

Seanie, your same argument could just as easily be made to capitulate to an invading force altogether. Ultimately it's a pacifist argument, because we never really "know" what an invading force will do. So is capitulation our automatic response ? Hell no, I hope.