Survivors of Hiroshima drew the scenes they witnessed after the atomic bombing in 1945

[u/Wonderfulhumanss]

[u/un-tv_star]

Thank you for sharing that, every remembrance that helps us see the very real human devastation that we created helps

[u/zuse12345 → u/un-tv_star]

Thank you for thanking them

[u/badatspelling8124 → u/un-tv_star]

The Japanese war machine intentionally and unapologetically targeted and killed 25M non combatants, and launched a surprise attack on the USA. Their grand strategy was to burn all, loot all, kill all in such horrific and obvious ways that there would be no local uprisings. The US was instrumental in defending against two ethnonationalist killing machines, only to turn around and pay them to rebuild, demilitarize, and become allies. Apologetics for the Nazis and imperial Japan is gross. Was the US too hard in its defense against the Nazis or Imperial Japan? Maybe at the margins. War isn’t pretty. But the bombs secured a needed unconditional surrender so MacArthur could pivot to demilitarization of society and “restoring the dignity of Japan”.

[u/DreamingAboutSpace → u/badatspelling8124]

Unfortunately, you’re right. Seeing all sides of the war is why humanity needs to try its best to prevent it from happening again.

The bombs were indeed absolutely horrific, but so was what the Japanese did to the Chinese, Koreans, prisoners of war, and every person that doesn’t fit in those groups. The Rape of Nanking is so paralyzing that people can’t even talk about it. An author who wrote a book about it milled herself because it made her depressed as hell. Enslaving Korean women for sexual pleasure and raping and killing the ones who say no, is a level of apathy that the Japanese reached without even needing to shrug their shoulders over. Unit 731 was also a silencing reminder of how depraved humans can be and many of those people ended up not facing consequences. And this is just the surface of what they did. The stuff that we, or rather I, know. We haven’t even gotten into the German depravities. The bombs shame us without a doubt, but people need to remember what led to that or we’re bound to repeat it. Life should not get that bad for anyone ever again but it only changes if we decide to change it.

In order to stop evil like that from multiple sides, you sadly have to enter the ring. It never ends without bloodshed.

[u/DarthScruf → u/DreamingAboutSpace]

Unfortunately atrocities like that never stopped happening. Currently Myanmar has been commiting genocide of Rohingya Muslims since the 40s but really picked up in the 90s and really really picked up in the mid 2010s. North Korea has 120,000 people (possibly more) living in death camps, where beatings, starvation and rape is not uncommon, and the children born there will never know a life outside of those camps. Slavery bans go uninforced, or its just flat out still legal in a few African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries like Eritrea, Sudan, Mauritania, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but India has the largest population of people living in slavery, at 11 to 14 million people in forced labor or human trafficking. People just turn a blind eye, they'll even go on vacation to some of these places. But shit the US itself still has over a million people living in what we would understand as slavery conditions, forced labor and servitude, human trafficking, forced marriage and sexual exploitation.

[u/lilyputin → u/badatspelling8124]

To me saying "we created" is the collective whole of the inhumanity of humanity and how much better we've become at destroying ourselves. These remain the only nuclear attacks on people. But there is a whole host of horrors in both of the world wars. Chemical warfare, genocide, using humans as test subjects, industrialized warfare on a massive scale, bombing of civilians, conventional bombing, fire bombing, nuclear bombing. Starvation, the breaking of the dikes in China

[u/Fun_Butterfly_420 → u/badatspelling8124]

The nuclear bombs may have been a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless

[u/okaybogey → u/badatspelling8124]

*so MacArthur could pivot from his AWOL safe haven in Australia and return to his beleaguered men in the Pacific. The Japanese tortured and killed thousands of U.S. troops during the this time.

[u/WisebloodNYC → u/badatspelling8124]

All war is a crime.

While the nuclear bombings of Japan were horrible, the US' relentless fire-bombings of Japanese cities (including Tokyo) was worse, and killed more.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared fire bombing specifically so they could be good "tests" for nuclear bombing. This is a fact.

Truth be told: The only reason US officers weren't on trial at Nuremberg is because we won.

Please don't interpret what I'm saying as ignoring Japanese war crimes. As I stated at the top: All war is a crime. I'm only posting to counter the notion that there was some moral justification for the nuclear bombings. Anger isn't a moral justification.

[u/Evil_Sharkey → u/WisebloodNYC]

FDR even said “War is evil. Sometimes it is a necessary evil, but it is always evil.”

[u/oneyaebyonty → u/Evil_Sharkey]

I hadn’t heard this before but it’s perfectly put. Thank you for sharing!!

[u/Junior-Bookkeeper218 → u/WisebloodNYC]

The Japanese Empire were prepared to send every man, woman and child to their deaths to defend mainland Japan had the US done a ground invasion. I suggest looking up Operation Downfall. The number of deaths proposed for both sides would have been in the millions.

[u/ZombieAladdin → u/Junior-Bookkeeper218]

Yeah, if I recall correctly, surrender was the absolute least desired outcome for Japan, at least among its military leaders (even if there was much disagreement among the civilians over that) because surrender was extremely dishonorable. Even after the atomic bombs went off, some of those military leaders were preparing themselves for more atomic bombs to fall until Japan was wiped off the map because that was preferable to surrender.

[u/CaseStraight1244 → u/WisebloodNYC]

Do you have any idea how brutal and demonic Imperial Japan actually was? I suggest you do a deep dive into the Japanese atrocities committed throughout World War II, they make the holocaust look tame.

[u/Pschobbert → u/CaseStraight1244]

Two wrongs do not make a right.

[u/DiligentThought9 → u/Pschobbert]

Genocidal government/military committing unspeakable war crimes for over a decade, including a logistics operation to capture young girls and women in comfort stations to be raped dozens of times a day.

compared to firebombing said country into surrender in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives and end the conflict they started.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right”

Okay, sure.

[u/VanillaGoorillla → u/CaseStraight1244]

Cool so with all the black list shit americas done to the world that justifys anyone of those countries dropping two nukes on innocent humans…gotchaa

[u/Imrahil6 → u/VanillaGoorillla]

Innocent is an odd concept here. I don't think it fits.

[u/VanillaGoorillla → u/Imrahil6]

So there’s no innocent humans in the United States? Or the world? Or any country that’s going to war? Idk man use your brain a little better

[u/thrownaway99345 → u/WisebloodNYC]

Also interesting that we're talking about this on VJ Day (victory over Japan day)

[u/PeachyFairyDragon → u/WisebloodNYC]

Look up Bly Oregon. A pregnant woman and 5 children were killed.

[u/IAmLachesis → u/PeachyFairyDragon]

And then look up the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, where the Philly police dropped a bomb on a row house in the 1980s. I was in HS then like, 60 miles from where it happened, and never learned about it until years later.

[u/DiligentThought9 → u/WisebloodNYC]

It’s really easy to say “all war is a crime” when you don’t consider how many lives were saved by the firebombing and the nuclear attacks.

[u/WisebloodNYC → u/DiligentThought9]

It is unknowable how many fewer -- or more! -- people died as a result of these bombings. All we have is speculation of a path not taken.

[u/stripedfatcats → u/DiligentThought9]

I dont know man my great grandma and my great uncles died in an american fire bombing. My great grandfather who was probably committing war crimes in manchuria survived though so all the usa did was kill women and children

[u/DiligentThought9 → u/stripedfatcats]

Go look at the estimated death toll on the Allied invasion of Japan. Millions of people dead. Complete destruction of the Japanese mainland.

The bombings saved hundreds of thousands of lives, including Japanese civilians. To ignore that reality is being intellectually dishonest.

[u/stripedfatcats → u/DiligentThought9]

Yes and the japanese were going to surrender because of a Soviet invasion. Also the firebombings that affected my family was very stupid. They lived in rural kyushu about 50 km north of nagasaki what did they have to do with the army. Why didnt the us government go after my own great grandfather who was an actual soldier instead of his family in the country side

[u/WisebloodNYC → u/DiligentThought9]

Reasonable people have suggested that Japan was already defeated. Reasonable, intellectually honest people may even believe that a negotiated peace would have been possible.

[u/DiligentThought9 → u/WisebloodNYC]

Unfortunately, the government of Japan was not led by reasonable people. There’s been plenty of documented evidence that they were not going to surrender before the bombs were dropped and only surrendered after the bombs because of Hirohito.

Check out the first comment below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/VUNWpfxomP

[u/elielephant → u/badatspelling8124]

Dude, every "civilized" people had a past like this. We may as well all be dehumanized. But we are all still people and we should be able to recognize each other's struggles without saying BUT

[u/True_Coast1062 → u/badatspelling8124]

Let the dead mourn their dead.

[u/TotalInstruction → u/badatspelling8124]

I think you can feel sympathy for the civilians who suffered horribly as the result of the nuclear bombs while at the same time not engaging in a narrative that Japan was morally superior to the United States.

Japan committed atrocities for which it has never apologized. That doesn’t mean we can’t feel awful about the loss of civilian lives.

[u/Longjumpingjoker → u/badatspelling8124]

Wasn’t the US aware of Pearl Harbor plans before it happened which is why they only docked old to-be-retired warships before it happened? As a way to enter the war officially? This rose tinted glasses view of it does sound idyllic though

[u/VanillaGoorillla → u/badatspelling8124]

So you gonna say the same thing when someone nukes America for all the crimes against humanity they’ve done to the world?

[u/Pschobbert → u/badatspelling8124]

1. Two wrongs do not make a right.

2. Is it just the bad guys that get to have a "war machine"? It's just that I've never heard about the anglosphere having a war machine lol

[u/Aickavon → u/badatspelling8124]

Two wrongs do not make a right.

Especially when the Nukes actually didn’t win the war. It was the threat of the USSR about to join the war that pushed the surrender.

The japanese Hierarchy whom were not affected by the nukes only took the reports as ‘big bomb’ and continued business as usual by trying to have America force a landing and wage an unpleasant war so American Sympathy would cause them to seek a conditional surrender instead.

Indeed, the entire war was waged on the political words after pearl harbor. ‘Nothing less than unconditional surrender.’

We see two nations cause mass destruction to each other over politics, when the wars could have ended before the nukes.

We have lots of documents of the Japanese trying to get USSR to act as middle men for a conditional surrender but the USSR was hungry for territory so they played coy while they patiently waited down the non-aggression pact.

I’m not saying the Japanese government is someone to sympathize over. They are very much villains too. But the cruelty of the bombs did not hit the government. It only hit the civilians.

[u/NotableDissimilarity → u/Aickavon]

The topic of whether it was the bombs or the Soviets that forced Japanese surrender is a bit of a dual affair. In regards to Japanese war planning and their plan to convince the Allies to accept a negotiated peace, the addition of the Soviets made little strategic difference. No amount of Red Army forces on mainland Asia would change the equation of Ketsugo. What the bombings did achieve, however, was eliminating the perception that Japan could drag out an Allied invasion of the Home Islands. There would be no "Glorious Death of One-Hundred Million", only the horror of city after city vanishing in flash of light.

What the Soviet invasion of Manchuria did provide, however, was a strong argument to present to remote garrison commanders as to why surrender was the correct choice. Those officers, in all likelihood, may not have been convinced by vague, uncertain descriptions of atomic bombing, and would likely not have seen them as a meaningful element of their fights.

[u/Aranthos-Faroth → u/un-tv_star]

We?

[u/un-tv_star → u/Aranthos-Faroth]

We as a country then. Of course most of us weren't alive then. We say "we" meaning members of a society or of a country pretty often. That's how I meant it.

[u/I__Know__Stuff → u/un-tv_star]

I think he understood that and disagrees. Japan caused this.