The nuclear bombing of Japan was planned years in advance. The US had to show the world or rather the Soviets the power of the weapon they had. They chose Japan because its people were not white.
No. The atomic bombs were intended to be used against Germany as well, but the Nazis surrendered before a working bomb could be deployed. The US chose Japan because they were at war with Japan and Okinawa proved just how costly an invasion would be.
Not that the US wasn't, and isn't, still virulently racist against Asians in many ways, but we didn't undertake the entire Manhattan Project because of racism or just to show up Stalin, that's absurd.
You can study the initiation of the Manhattan project if you will. But once the bomb was built, it had to be used. And America at that point was already planning for the world after it had defeated the Axis powers and that is where the dark racist geopolitcs comes in.
It's a repudiation of the premise that "They (the US) chose Japan because its people were not white." Had the war in the Pacific ended first, the US would have dropped the bombs on Germany. Simplistic reductionist arguments like that only risk turning what could be interesting discussions into race-baiting flamewars.
As far as dropping the bombs as a display of power to Stalin goes, it's a conspiracy theory without hard evidence. I'm sure the US was aware of the wider geopolitical context of what they were doing, but if all they wanted was to show Stalin they had a working bomb, they could have dropped one on Alaska or anywhere. The US' primary concern at the time was ending the war.
My source for this is documentation on display in the Hiroshima museum. Make of it what you will. PS: I don't judge the US for being racist - everyone was racist by today's standard anno 1944.
> My source for this is documentation on display in the Hiroshima museum. Make of it what you will. PS: I don't judge the US for being racist - everyone was racist by today's standard anno 1944.
There's probably an actual argument to be made for it being motivated by racism but what you have posted here is not doing much for the case.
“Always” the target?: While U.S. bomb scientists were racing against Germany, military planners were looking toward the Pacific
By Arjun Makhijani
As for racism; well it was a different time. But look at the vilification of the Japanese and the American internment camps during the war. Plus the subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam.
everything you have said doesnt prove racism is a factor, much less the primary motivator. youre either using "racism" with a definition that makes it meaningless or using it incorrectly.
the japenese killed americans in a surprise attack while US was not involved in the war. civillians were sacrificing to support the war effort. its not some mystery why the US would be eager to bomb japan and end the war. similarly, the japenese internment camps in the US were hardly inexplicable. when youre at war with people X, its reasonable to be at war with ALL people X, not just the ones in uniform. spycraft is a thing, and people often bear allegiance to their homelands. there are subtle types of sabotage that any enemy can perform.
you have to prove the US wanted to kill the japanese becuase of their race, instead of the much more obvious and well-supported claim that US wanted to get revenge and end the war in the same blow.
I consider it a historical fact that the choice of Japan for the nuclear attack was made in 1943. It changes from primary a military target (harbor of Truk) to a list of 4 cities where the casualties would be mostly civilian later. The expectation of tens of thousands of civilian casulties is documented by the target commitee.
On the racial undertones, I am not the only who sees them - this is from Wikipedia:
Author John M. Curatola wrote that the anti-Japanese sentiment probably played a role in the strategic bombing of Japanese cities,[22] which began on March 9/10, 1945 with the destructive Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo to August 15, 1945, with the surrender of Japan.[23] Sixty-nine cities in Japan lost significant areas and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives to firebombing and nuclear attacks from United States Army Air Forces B-29 Superfortress bombers during this period.[24] According to Curatola and historian James J. Weingartner, both firebombing and nuclear attacks were partially the result of a dehumanization of the enemy,[22] with the latter saying, "[T]he widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands" across Japan.[25] On the second day after the Nagasaki bomb, President Harry S. Truman stated: "The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true".[10][26]
I don’t know how much you know about the atrocities the Japanese inflicted on everyone during WWII but things were much more civilized on the western front and you were dealing with the Nazis and Hitler there.
The Japanese were absolute insane and completely fanatics committing unspeakable atrocities.
Soldiers that fought the Japanese were absolutely destroyed for life and the Chinese were just one of the asian people suffering all kinds atrocities at their hands.
Japan was already defeated when those bombs were dropped but they were seriously planning to fight to the last man/woman/child. There were plans by the state of mass suicide if they failed.
Now you may think dropping 2 nukes on them is an atrocity of the worst kind by the white man but consider you don’t know as much as the people making the decision.
I second that. It’s pretty fascinating. The story of the Japanese campaign on Singapore and the Malay peninsula is pretty wild for the atrocities by the Japanese.
There is a lot of Hollywood thinking in the American understanding of the second world war. That America somehow won the war because they were good and had god on their side.
However everyone goes into war thinking they have god on their side. Reality is that wars are won by having resources and being nasty.
> That America somehow won the war because they were good
That's demonstrably true:
1) the Allies worked together and won, and the Axis didn't and lost. Britain and the US shared advanced technology transparently, while the enemy was limited.
2) the US was isolationist until attacked by Japan.
3) Japan refused to follow the Geneva Convention, even making a law that captured airmen were to be executed (and half were, while 1% died in German captivity.)
The leftist narrative that the US is evil is simply false.
Actually, the military teaches its soldiers and officers that war is won by making the other side surrender, not by being nasty. The greatest victory is one where they surrender without a single battle being waged (pretty sure that’s in the Art of War).
To that point, the enemy will only surrender if they know you will accept their surrender and treat them decently rather than torturing and/or killing them. War-crimes make it harder to win wars by convincing the enemy they have nothing to lose,
What??? Germany had already surrendered, Japan was the only major Axis power left.
They used the bomb immediately after it was built. There was a single test, Trinity, then the next bomb went to Japan. How could they choose Japan years in advance when they used the bomb the second it came off the assembly line???
The US nuked Japan because a land invasion was projected to kill millions on both sides. Because Japan is mountainous and its people were prepared to fight till the bitter end, which was proven by the number of kamikaze attacks.
The US wanted the war to end quickly without losing a lot of their troops. The Japanese Emperor had to be convinced the war was unwinnable. The Atom bomb was the easiest way to do that. The US also avoided bombing Kyoto to preserve Japanese cultural heritage. If they wanted to to do maximum damage, they could have done worse.
It should be remembered that it was Japan that attacked the United States, which was at the time a neutral power. They, like Germany, brought the war and destruction upon themselves.
Somehow you twist a war that was started by Japan into "The US is racist". As an American, I find that incredibly offensive.
People really underestimate how well the ussr did in ww2. Both in terms of the fighting and the result. Even with the Axis working to try and give the west as much aid as possible, Stalin controlled everything from the Rhine to the sea of Japan. The west's only real advantage was the US strategic airforce and nuclear weapons. The Soviets trumped those with their own bombs and sputnik within a decade.
The war in Europe was already decided in 1943 at Stalingrad, over a year before the Western Front was even opened, and I guess the populace of Nazi-occupied Europe was very well aware of that.
A (not so minor) correction: The Red Army stopped roughly at the Elbe/Mulde rivers, not at the Rhine. Large parts of what would later become the Soviet Occupation Zone (and later East Germany) were actually liberated by the US Army (the US and UK do deserve a lot of credit for preventing the Soviet Union from occupying all of Europe after the war had ended of course).
I've lived in Japan for over 30-years, read quite a bit about the events and internal debates that lead up to the decision to surrender, and been a part of more conversations on the subject than I can remember.
The facts in the article are not wrong (the rarely are), but the problem is the reductionist approach to answering the question of "what really ended the war?"
You can make a strong, evidence-backed case that the atomic bombs did, and you can make an equally strong case that they did not.
There is no one thing that ended the war. It's certainly interesting to consider how things might have played out under various counterfactuals, but as much as we would all find a simple, tidy answer far more satisfying, the reasons the war ended are just as complex and nuanced as the reasons the war started.
The recent revisionist trend towards "the communists won the war" is a rather silly and bald faced effort to glamorize that broken system. This is nonsense.
Stalin jumped on the chance to "liberate" Manchuria and North Korea, after the Americans fought and won the war in the Pacific. When the soviets entered the war against Japan everything was already decided, there had been two nuclear bombings, Okinawa was under American occupation and it was clear there would be an imminent surrender. To make things 100% clear it was not Stalin nor the Bomb it was almost 4 years of fighting in the pacific.
The author is reaching here. I don't buy their narrative of how the timeline doesn't support the idea that the bombings did it. There are easy arguments against that position. Additionally, how can the author be certain of what they knew at what time? Don't you think they also had a capable spy network?? At the very least the threat of bombardment would definitely be weighing heavily on their minds.
Historians' opinions about this have changed over time -- the generation of people who experienced it felt that a land invasion of Japan would be ruinous, and would kill a million US men.
To that effect, the US tried firebombing cities, paraded battleships along the coast, sent subs to the Inland Sea, and telegraphed that they would destroy a city completely. Then they did.
Meanwhile, the USSR invaded and militarily routed the Japanese.
For the Japanese, the situation was militarily hopeless and had been for a while, but the events of August made this very clear to a wider audience.
Perhaps there was no single event that triggered the surrender, but opinion, even of ministers, can cascade rapidly. Once one person publicly lost faith, it became easier for others to join him, but that might not have been initiated by a specific event or on a specific timeline.
This feels like very motivated reasoning. Yes, the Soviets took Manchuria, but they had no capacity to invade Japan in 1945. They had a very small navy to begin with, and essentially no pacific fleet at all. This is important because you need a huge fleet to launch a full scale invasion of an island country.
For instance, the invasion of Okinawa Island alone, which is extremely small in comparison to Japan, involved 1,300 U.S. ships and dozens more from the Royal Navy.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 92.7 ms ] threadNot that the US wasn't, and isn't, still virulently racist against Asians in many ways, but we didn't undertake the entire Manhattan Project because of racism or just to show up Stalin, that's absurd.
You can study the initiation of the Manhattan project if you will. But once the bomb was built, it had to be used. And America at that point was already planning for the world after it had defeated the Axis powers and that is where the dark racist geopolitcs comes in.
It's a repudiation of the premise that "They (the US) chose Japan because its people were not white." Had the war in the Pacific ended first, the US would have dropped the bombs on Germany. Simplistic reductionist arguments like that only risk turning what could be interesting discussions into race-baiting flamewars.
As far as dropping the bombs as a display of power to Stalin goes, it's a conspiracy theory without hard evidence. I'm sure the US was aware of the wider geopolitical context of what they were doing, but if all they wanted was to show Stalin they had a working bomb, they could have dropped one on Alaska or anywhere. The US' primary concern at the time was ending the war.
There's probably an actual argument to be made for it being motivated by racism but what you have posted here is not doing much for the case.
“Always” the target?: While U.S. bomb scientists were racing against Germany, military planners were looking toward the Pacific
By Arjun Makhijani
As for racism; well it was a different time. But look at the vilification of the Japanese and the American internment camps during the war. Plus the subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam.
the japenese killed americans in a surprise attack while US was not involved in the war. civillians were sacrificing to support the war effort. its not some mystery why the US would be eager to bomb japan and end the war. similarly, the japenese internment camps in the US were hardly inexplicable. when youre at war with people X, its reasonable to be at war with ALL people X, not just the ones in uniform. spycraft is a thing, and people often bear allegiance to their homelands. there are subtle types of sabotage that any enemy can perform.
you have to prove the US wanted to kill the japanese becuase of their race, instead of the much more obvious and well-supported claim that US wanted to get revenge and end the war in the same blow.
On the racial undertones, I am not the only who sees them - this is from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japanese_sentiment_in_the...
Strategic bombing of Japan
Author John M. Curatola wrote that the anti-Japanese sentiment probably played a role in the strategic bombing of Japanese cities,[22] which began on March 9/10, 1945 with the destructive Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo to August 15, 1945, with the surrender of Japan.[23] Sixty-nine cities in Japan lost significant areas and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives to firebombing and nuclear attacks from United States Army Air Forces B-29 Superfortress bombers during this period.[24] According to Curatola and historian James J. Weingartner, both firebombing and nuclear attacks were partially the result of a dehumanization of the enemy,[22] with the latter saying, "[T]he widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands" across Japan.[25] On the second day after the Nagasaki bomb, President Harry S. Truman stated: "The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true".[10][26]
Compared to what?
During what time period?
That's a very broad statement that doesn't stand up to analysis.
The US gave freedom and rebuilt many Asian countries (Indonesia, Philippines, etc.) after WW2. If that's virulent, then I want more.
(from other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867366)
As always, it's quite more a complex factor of several events than a simple story line.
Japan was already defeated when those bombs were dropped but they were seriously planning to fight to the last man/woman/child. There were plans by the state of mass suicide if they failed.
Now you may think dropping 2 nukes on them is an atrocity of the worst kind by the white man but consider you don’t know as much as the people making the decision.
However everyone goes into war thinking they have god on their side. Reality is that wars are won by having resources and being nasty.
That's demonstrably true:
1) the Allies worked together and won, and the Axis didn't and lost. Britain and the US shared advanced technology transparently, while the enemy was limited.
2) the US was isolationist until attacked by Japan.
3) Japan refused to follow the Geneva Convention, even making a law that captured airmen were to be executed (and half were, while 1% died in German captivity.)
The leftist narrative that the US is evil is simply false.
To that point, the enemy will only surrender if they know you will accept their surrender and treat them decently rather than torturing and/or killing them. War-crimes make it harder to win wars by convincing the enemy they have nothing to lose,
They used the bomb immediately after it was built. There was a single test, Trinity, then the next bomb went to Japan. How could they choose Japan years in advance when they used the bomb the second it came off the assembly line???
The US nuked Japan because a land invasion was projected to kill millions on both sides. Because Japan is mountainous and its people were prepared to fight till the bitter end, which was proven by the number of kamikaze attacks.
The US wanted the war to end quickly without losing a lot of their troops. The Japanese Emperor had to be convinced the war was unwinnable. The Atom bomb was the easiest way to do that. The US also avoided bombing Kyoto to preserve Japanese cultural heritage. If they wanted to to do maximum damage, they could have done worse.
It should be remembered that it was Japan that attacked the United States, which was at the time a neutral power. They, like Germany, brought the war and destruction upon themselves.
Somehow you twist a war that was started by Japan into "The US is racist". As an American, I find that incredibly offensive.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...
The war in Europe was already decided in 1943 at Stalingrad, over a year before the Western Front was even opened, and I guess the populace of Nazi-occupied Europe was very well aware of that.
A (not so minor) correction: The Red Army stopped roughly at the Elbe/Mulde rivers, not at the Rhine. Large parts of what would later become the Soviet Occupation Zone (and later East Germany) were actually liberated by the US Army (the US and UK do deserve a lot of credit for preventing the Soviet Union from occupying all of Europe after the war had ended of course).
The facts in the article are not wrong (the rarely are), but the problem is the reductionist approach to answering the question of "what really ended the war?"
You can make a strong, evidence-backed case that the atomic bombs did, and you can make an equally strong case that they did not.
There is no one thing that ended the war. It's certainly interesting to consider how things might have played out under various counterfactuals, but as much as we would all find a simple, tidy answer far more satisfying, the reasons the war ended are just as complex and nuanced as the reasons the war started.
Meanwhile, the USSR invaded and militarily routed the Japanese.
For the Japanese, the situation was militarily hopeless and had been for a while, but the events of August made this very clear to a wider audience.
Perhaps there was no single event that triggered the surrender, but opinion, even of ministers, can cascade rapidly. Once one person publicly lost faith, it became easier for others to join him, but that might not have been initiated by a specific event or on a specific timeline.
For instance, the invasion of Okinawa Island alone, which is extremely small in comparison to Japan, involved 1,300 U.S. ships and dozens more from the Royal Navy.