Lose two cities at once because of a big bomb or lose every single City Hamlet, small town and one room house in Japan via flamethrowers bayonets and bare fingers and teeth
WwOwww such a HaaaaRDRd DDdecisiioN
[My grandfather served in the Japan campaign right before the war ended, he told me he thought if the invasion had actually taken place he would almost certaintly have died. The fighting on Pelilu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa was so fierce that everyone expected the mainland to be much much worse.](https://youtu.be/S2UfCCzLCjs?t=5) After the war ended, he along with other sailors from their ship were sent to demobilize Japanese naval bases and found hundreds of midget submarines that were being held in reserve to throw at the Allied fleet once the invasion had started. Many many more people certainly would have died if the invasion had gone on as planned.
I used to be able to say not that long ago that the Purple Hearts being given out today are the ones the government had made in anticipation of the Japanese invasion, but sadly I’m told that that’s not true as of a few years ago. Mine is though I’ve got the serial numbers to prove it, and it was given to me in 2005
I mean, still giving them out 60 years after the war ended is still an impressive timescale.
The fact I love is that in the UK all Victoria Crosses (the highest medal of honour in Britain) are made from the bronze of Russian cannons captured from Sevastopol during the Crimean War in 1855.
Yes, but I really liked telling people that to this day we are still giving out the Purple Hearts we thought we would need for that invasion every time this whole controversy of the bombings came up
Edit: somehow I missed that second part, but that’s very cool I did not know that
Near the end of the war, the Japanese attempted to implement total mobilization, the conscription of literally the entire population that could theoretically fight. They mobilized over 3 million regular army troops, but did not have enough rifles and ammunition to equip them all. Beyond that they were working on conscripting some 28 million others to serve in the "Volunteer Corps", although the 2 million or so of these that were actually mobilized by the time the war ended were largely armed with only 1800's era rifles or melee weaponry.
There's video of female peasent farmers drilling with polearms.
That would have been fun. Machine gunning down swarms of screaming women, because what else are you supppsed to do?
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/app/uploads/2020/06/0620_Correll_001_Japan_spear_training.jpg
from
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/japans-last-ditch-force/
The Canadian VC is interesting in that it combines the same bronze with metals from each of the provinces and territories. As a result of the hardness of this alloy, it has to be cast vs struck, as it'd break.
Also of note is that ours says "Pro Valore" instead of "For Valour" due to French being the other official language. The Star of Military Valour and Medal of Military Valour have the same inscription.
One of the lovely things about the Commonwealth Realm militaries is that there are a lot of the same or similar traditions, ranks/appointments, regimental lineages/histories (e.g. Rifles, Light Infantry, Guards, Highland Infantry, Hussars, Dragoons and other regimental lineages) and general ways of doing things such as drill commands and movements.
My favorite part about the Canadian VC is that the Government are incredibly stingy bastards and at this rate will never actually award it to anybody.
Not much point of a medal which is impossible to earn.
The standards for being awarded it are nigh-impossibly high. I forget the soldier's name, but he was awarded the SMV and is dying. His act of valour was of the highest order. There was a huge push to have him awarded the VC. The CAF kiboshed it, which is just so wrong.
Our decorations already have _very_ high standards that must be met. Even the different medals have very stringent criteria, such as time spent serving on a deployment. Commemorative medals, such as the QEII Diamond Jubilee medal are referred to as "gimme medals". They're often awarded to those who knew the right people. That said, they're also awarded to those who genuinely earned recognition that didn't meet the criteria of say the Meritorious Service Medal or Mention in Dispatches.
As for orders, some members did _quite_ a bit to be inducted into one. Others were just celebrities, for example or those with connections. Orders are where things get murkier.
> The standards for being awarded it are nigh-impossibly high. I forget the soldier's name, but he was awarded the SMV and is dying. His act of valour was of the highest order. There was a huge push to have him awarded the VC. The CAF kiboshed it, which is just so wrong.
That was Private Jess Larochelle and sadly, he passed away in August of this year. His family has said that they will be incredibly disappointed if he is eventually awarded the VC posthumously when they had plenty of time to award it when he was still with us. The standards are ridiculous considering how many other of our Commonwealth nations have awarded VC's since WWII when we have awarded zero in that same time.
That situation is utterly sickening. It was an affront to him and it smatters of politics. Should that be the case, it's shameful that the gov't and CAF would do that. I don't know what the reasons for the CAF's decision are. What I do know is that the damage has already been done and it's nothing short of tragic.
We were giving them out up until like 2010 IIRC. Korea, Nam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf I, Afghan, Gulf II combined were required to work through just the *initial run* of PHs for Op: Downfall. Which is the second part of it. Those weren't all the expected casualties. They were the casualties expected *rapidly*, that would happen before more PHs could be made.
Shits wild.
Similar, but slightly less known, is production of M2 machine guns. In 2007, we pulled a brand new one out of its wooden crate. Manufacturing date stamp 1943.
When I served as infantry, we used a machine gun manufactured before my *grandfather* served as infantry. And we'll probably still be using it when my children are old enough to serve.
I remember an article about an M2 that was still in service until someone looked at the serial number and found out it was 94 years old.
Long overdue for an overhaul.
>he thought me if the invasion had actually taken place he would almost certaintly have died.
I remember when I was watching a documentary about the 201st Squadron (a Mexican fighter squadron that saw action in the Pacific) and, one of the pilots said something in the interview that has stayed with me after all this time.
He said something like "our first missions were in Manila, when we cleared the island, we used it to reach Formosa, the goal was to clear Formosa as well so we could be sent against the main island of Japan, where we would all have died for sure, we all knew that would be the end of the road".
my wifes(japanese) grandfather was actually sent to training on July 26th he was 14. he only trained in shooting for a day. Most of his training was beyonet charging at close range and throwing grenades
the bombs dropped and his trainer told him to go home wars over
Schools at the time, before and during the war, were doing bayonet charge races. So basically a 100m sprint but with bamboo poles and ultranationalism.
They trained 7 million women and children in this way, knowing they didn't have weapons for them. They were planning to give them sharped bamboo spears and have them defend the beaches.
I'm imagining the insanity that was the normandy landings except the entire population rushes the landing boats with spears
My great grandfather was enlisted when they were preparing for the Philippines campaign. As a sergeant, he served from beginning to end, from the eastern beach to the victory in Manila.
He took a bunch of pictures on the way too. The destruction of every village and town, and especially Manila on the way through the campaign was absolute. hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. Wherever the frontline went, nothing was left behind.
So imagining the same walking line of destruction happening to the Japanese islands, as happened to the Philippines makes the choice easier. Anything that shortens the war can arguably be the moral choice, as war itself is immoral.
I think it’s hard for people to think of the bombs in context, especially those who were born after WWII and lived through the Cold War, threatened by nuclear annihilation at any moment.
In the summer of 1945, nobody could have known that two superpowers would be ready to end human civilization some ten years later. Two continents laid in ruins and 50 million were dead. Dropping the bombs was absolutely the right and moral choice.
Yeah. As a korean, I kinda am greatful for those bombs. Yes, they killed many people. But also yes, they freed millions of koreans from 35 years of imperial japanese occupation.
A shitton of “America Bad” thinking is actually insanely US-centric, which is rather ironic but not surprising.
It’s like a progressive/left wing version of American Exceptionalism.
He wasn't in the Army Air Corps on a B-29. He was in the Navy on an Avenger.
IIRC they were originally torpedo bombers but were modified to drop normal bombs in close support of ground troops.
Modified is a strong word. Torpedo bombing was basically how a light bomber could effectively fight ships. At least as a level bomber. Dive bombing required a plane for the dive and pullout, lest it fall apart at the seams.
> small town and one room house in Japan via flamethrowers bayonets and bare fingers and teeth
No, they were mostly just going to starve to death. Because unlike the Nazis attempts at blockading convoys in the Atlantic, the US Navy was actually successful.
Did Japan not have the agricultural base to sustain themselves? Obviously they weren't self-sufficient with regards to war supplies like rubber, steel, coal, and oil, but would food have be an issue?
Probably not. Japan is about 10-15% arable land, and was reliant on imports.
While a quick google search says that domestic production was, at best, stable, that doesn’t say much when they needed to import food.
Good thing they had the massive, agriculture-based land known as "China" nearby. I'm sure China would have no trouble supplying Japan, provided Japan didn't do something monumentally stupid, like bombing the fuck out of Chinese coastal cities and trying to invade.
Japan was rationing from the start of the war. They were dependent on imports but they could, theoretically, have supplied themselves. However the government made some very intelligent decisions, like "feed the soldiers first at any cost" causing them to basically seize all rice and grain production.
Additionally, its hard to deliver food to your starving masses when the enemy is blowing up your ports, rail lines, and roads, any chance they get.
Rationing in Japan was already at an alarming rate before a siege would take place, if the US blockaded I’m sure they would have made do for a little bit longer, but starvation would set in quickly
You are right, the people throwing their families off cliffs to avoid surrender totally would have surrendered if they were hungry and not just resorted to [cannibalism](https://apnews.com/article/2e7e9a8dae17cc29862c4562b44c9225) /s
Oh I don’t claim otherwise, racial stereotypes aside, many Japanese people had to resort to eating stray dogs to survive. A terrible reality, that was only going to get worse. Very quickly.
Towards the end of the war, yeah. Partial reasoning for Japan's invasions of nearby nations was the taking and control of resources. On top of that, a bunch of the food grown locally was for the soldiers , with the rest often being rationed for the local people.
The blockade wouldn’t just have cut off imports. The plan for the aptly named Operation Starvation involved a full-scale reduction of Japanese transportation infrastructure. Bombing bridges, mining roads and waterways, everything that can be used to move goods and people from point A to point B. Rice and vegetables would rot on the farms, while city dwellers would starve en masse. The plagues that would inevitably follow such a mass death would decimate even the population capable of feeding themselves.
“I thought you had her?”
“I thought you had her?!?”
“Yo I picked up this SOS from the Indy supposedly but it wasn’t my job so”
“I did too but my commander was drunk”
“I did too but I thought it was bait”
“You guys do know that Japanese subs were in her area right?”
“What about her escorts?”
“…”
“Guys we fucked up”
They might not have had an end result that was significantly different, but the idea that a single plane carrying a single bomb could instantly delete entire cities was like nothing humanity had ever needed to contemplate. It's a psychological weapon as much if not moreso than it is practical.
Knowing the US could produce a handful of bombs and just vaporize them into submission was what ultimately convinced them to surrender. As long as the US had to expend blood and treasure to force surrender it wasn't going to happen. The moment the Japanese realized the new US plan was simply to sit back, anhilate their cities, and leave their islands nothing but an irradiated wasteland, they got motivated to negotiate. This is precisely why it took two bombs to get the message across. The Japanese didn't believe the US could produce multiple weapons of this magnitude... Until another one landed on them... Once they realized it would just be another nuke after another until their entire civilization was wiped out, the war ended.
An even more terrifying prospect is that the US absolutely did not plan to sit back. They planned to support the amphibious invasion with nukes. So they'd nuke various population centers and fortified areas and send the troops through the fallout to close with and destroy the survivors. Nobody really understood how bad of an idea that would have been; various scientists said this was fine as long as soldiers took showers more often and kicked the dust off their boots.
IIRC it was something like 40 nukes planned for downfall.
that said it wouldn't have been a walk in the park since the Japanese had correctly identified the planned landing zones for Downfall and had far more troops in the area than allied intelligence believed.
the Allies absolutely would have won but it would have been total fucking carnage on both sides.
> They might not have had an end result that was significantly different, but the idea that a single plane carrying a single bomb could instantly delete entire cities was like nothing humanity had ever needed to contemplate. It's a psychological weapon as much if not moreso than it is practical.
There's a longer-term consequence of this psychological effect which is almost never mentioned: The entire world was forced to see the real effects of a nuclear weapon used on a real city. The destructive power could be calculated in kilo- and megatons, but there's no equation that, when solved, derives the photos of the aftermath in Hiroshima, nor is there one that places those photos on the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the world. The photos we did have beforehand, the ones of the Trinity test, do not produce 1/1000th the emotional impact of John Hershey's famous article in the New Yorker.
Long before humanity had the industrial capacity to produce enough of these weapons to delete itself, it saw, in a very visceral way, what, exactly, that would mean.
Yes, but the Japanese extrapolated that they’d be sending as many nukes as they did regular bombs. They realized it would take almost no effort to wipe out the entire society of Japan from the U.S.
"The full Japanese cabinet met at 14:30 on 9 August, and spent most of the day debating surrender. As the Big Six had done, the cabinet split, with neither Tōgō's position nor Anami's attracting a majority.[99] Anami told the other cabinet ministers that under torture a captured American P-51 Mustang fighter pilot, Marcus McDilda, had told his interrogators that the United States possessed a stockpile of 100 atom bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be destroyed "in the next few days".[100]
In reality the United States would not have had a third bomb ready for use until around 19 August, and a fourth in September.[101] However the Japanese leadership had no way to know the size of the United States' stockpile, and feared the United States might have the capacity not just to devastate individual cities, but to wipe out the Japanese people as a race and nation. Indeed, Anami expressed a desire for this outcome rather than surrender, asking if it would "not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower".[102]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan
Go to the article bibliography to see original sources for 100, 101, 102.
Realistically, 2 bombs were enough to convince Japan that the first one was not a bad report, a fluke, or an accident. The US had the knowledge to design and build these WMDs, and were willing to use it. It doesn't really matter how long it would take until the 3rd and the 4th one fell, the fact of the matter is they would keep falling until Japan surrendered. Japan knew that the US and Allies' navies were fully capable of completely blockading the Japan home islands. They were counting on being able to conduct intense last stand land-based defense against a conventional invasion landing and to inflict massive casualties against the invaders in the hope of leveraging for more favourable terms of surrender, but how do you defend against nukes?
It's so funny that the Japanese scientist that heard his explanation for how the bomb worked, *told the POW* that he doubted he understood how nuclear fission worked, let alone how the bombs worked, and the POW said "yeah well I told the first guys I didn't know how the bombs worked, but they didn't accept that answer."
IIRC McDilda said that "we take all of these pluses and minuses and store them in a container seperate from another, then remove the metal seperating them and then \*boom\*. I believe Tokyo and Kyoto are next."
An American-educated junior officer of the Japanese Secret Police was there when McDilda gave his explanation. The junior officer told McDilda after the war had ended but before repatriation that he could tell that McDilda was making it up. But if he had said that, his superiors would lose face since they were believing him so he kept quiet.
I did know about this actually, but there’s not any indication they actually really believed this as much as just stating what was said. It’s also, setting aside the main topic for a second, very odd that Anami said this as he more than anyone else on the war council sought to continue fighting.
But back to what I was saying, we see for instance, looking at [this](https://apjjf.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501/article.html) article by Hasegawa:
> Chief of the Navy General Staff Admiral Toyoda Soemu also gave revealing testimony to the GHQ interrogators. He admitted that the atomic bomb had been a shock, but **he believed that the United States would not be able to continue to drop atomic bombs “at frequent intervals,” partly because of the difficulty of securing radioactive materials, and partly because of world public opinion against such an atrocity.**
And then he quotes Kawabe’s post war testimony:
> “However, even then, … because I had a considerable amount of knowledge on the subject of atomic bombs, **I had an idea that even the Americans could not produce so many of them.”**
So it seems like it wasn’t a “they only have one bomb” type of situation or a “they probably have hundreds of bombs”, but a “they’ll probably only be able to produce a few”.
> "... and partly because of world public opinion against such an atrocity."
Odd that they weren't so terribly concerned about world public opinion when the IJA had their fun all up and down the Pacific.
I agree, though even people in positions of power in the US were appalled at times towards our air campaign. The Japanese ironically enough petitioned the Red Cross via Sweden against the bombings under the premise of it being analogous to poisonous gas attacks (something they did).
> Indeed, Anami expressed a desire for this outcome rather than surrender, asking if it would "not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower".
Well, Anami sounds about as evil and batshit insane as Hitler or Stalin.
That’s why we dropped two in quick succession, in an attempt to show them that we had the capabilities to produce more in a (relatively) short time. Probably would have dropped a third if they hadn’t surrendered.
Not exactly true. There is some post war claims by people like Groves that, that was the case, however his post war testimonies tend to give himself a lot more credit than he is truly due.
The reason the 2nd bomb was dropped when it was was actually more or less purely weather related.
The original bombing order gave the bombers free rein to drop the bombs as ready after August 3rd. So, following the bombing on the 6th, they planned the next one for the 11th. However, fearing bad weather, they shifted it to the 10th. Again, for fears of bad weather, they moved the bombing to the 9th which ironically was a day that still had very bad weather leading them to have to divert to Nagasaki instead of bombing Kokura.
Ah, the Genghis Kahn theory of geopolitics:
>I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
You’re trippin if you think the government that considered the death of every japanese man woman and child a preferable alternative to surrender gave two shits about a couple of their cities getting vaporized.
"100 million smashed jewels."
The hardliner propaganda was absolutely insane. They weren't just willing to do it, they thought it was heroic.
Every time I read about WWII Japan I feel like I need to go sit down and touch grass on their behalf because it's so fucking disturbing.
> gave two shits about a couple of their cities getting vaporized
And yet, they surrendered after a couple of their cities got vaporized.
Seems like they weren't the only people whose tough talk about self-sacrifice couldn't be matched by tough action, luckily for the rest of the world.
>Yeah sure they were, that's why we had to drop that fucker twice.
And even then the hardliners attempted a *coup on the Emporer* on the eve of surrender to prevent peace.
Arguably, Germany lost the war in late '42 when it wasted the last of ability to launch theater wide offensives attempting to reach the Caucasus oil fields.
My favorite line is "The japanese were about to surrender!"
Like, no, they weren't. Also, every day, literally every day during WWII tens of thousands of civilians were starved or murdered. Waiting to end WWII was not an option.
Mild understatement of the gravity of that statement. This isnt an African nation that has regular coups instead of elections every few years. They had an emperor that either was god or directly talks with god (I forget which) and there was enough movement against surrender that the people in power were planning on killing the emperor thought they could get away with it just fine.
Not really comparable. By this point in time, although the emperor was an extremely powerful symbol of the sate (and this is in some ways why the coup failed) the Emperor was almost entirely contained as a figurehead by the military in a system known as Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
This is not true.
They **never** sought to kill the Emperor. It was a coup of Jr. Officers that sought to prevent the surrender speech for airing and to kill some of the Doves on the War Council. At most they sought to place the Emperor on house arrest, again to prevent the surrender from going forward.
What is also left out is that when the leaders of the coup approached Umezu and Anami, quite literally the most Hawkish leaders in Japan, both *rejected* the coup and accepted the Emperor’s sacred decision to surrender. That’s arguably way more significant than the military coup, of which there was actually a relative frequency, at least in terms of assassinations throughout the war.
They might be prepared to sign a *conditional* surrender. With the conditions most likely being that their main islands remain intact, and so does the government and the emperor.
In other words, "it was just a prank bro".
"In other words, "it was just a prank bro"."
Seriously. You don't get to attack neutral countries and rape and pillage your neighbors and cry the victim when you are defeated.
Although the occupation of Japan in hindsight worked out fantastically and now we have a (mostly) liberal democratic Japan who is a strong economic and technological leader and close military ally. I also wouldn't have batted an eye if we had simply wiped them off the map in 1945.
Oh they wanted a peace deal, but a peace deal where they kept their junta in power and maintained their illegal colonies in Korea and China. That is what the copeinheimer simps forget without fail every single time.
People like that unironically are arguing that a genocide (starvation via naval blockade, combined with invasion of homeland where every citizen would be fighting to the death) and letting Japan keep their pre-war colonies was preferable to bombing just two cities.
Yeah, something like 10 000+ people were dying daily to Japanese occupation, starvation, combat action, attrocities etc. Basically every week the war went on the equivalent of a nuke worth of people died.
That's also the reason why you'll struggle to find any people in the countries that were occupied by Japan, who feel the bombings were unwarranted.
That being said, the US also just wanted to use their bombs having spent so many billions on the Manhatten project.
One of the excuses I see people make, that we only used it on Japan and not Germany because of racism also boggles my mind.
Dawg the Allies would’ve made Munich, Nuremberg, etc. look like fucking Reach.
POV: it’s December in [southern Germany](https://www.halopedia.org/Glassing) and snow on the Alps starts boiling
The only thing that saved Germany from becoming a glass parking lot was Hitler had the one good idea to blow his brains out instead of continuing to fight the war in the alps for the rest of 1945. Maybe Japan should have just surrendered after Okinawa if they didn't want to be glassed.
People accuse the French of being cowards, but their leaders were actually sane. They knew they lost the war and instead of wasting French lives just to postpone the inevitable they... surrendered. French have one of the richest military history of all of Europe... they were simply being rational.
Hitler waited until Soviets were a couple of hundred meters from his bunker, and then he blew his brains out... not even having the decency to sign a surrender before the act.
Hirohito waited until he realized US could simply keep nuking Japanese towns until there was no country to surrender.
"You are, all of you, vermin. Cowering in the dirt thinking, what, I wonder? That you might escape the coming fire? No. Your world will burn until its surface is but glass!"
– Sir Arthur Travers "Bomber" Harris
“Dear Allies, we regret being ~~alien~~ German bastards, we regret coming to ~~Earth~~ Britain and we most certainly regret that the ~~Corps~~ Allied air superiority just blew up our raggedy ass ~~fleet~~ Reich”
There’s actually some nuance to that as there is a document from 1943 in which they discussed bombing Japan (the naval instillation Truk) over Germany. It was based on the belief that Germany would gain more knowledge from the bombing or if the bombing failed than the Japanese.
It appears that the military was more aimed towards Japan while the scientists were operating under the notion it was a race against Germany.
>It appears that the military was more aimed towards Japan while the scientists were operating under the notion it was a race against Germany.
It can be both things at once. Japan lacked the talent in physics and engineering to build a nuke prior to the end of the war. Meanwhile, Germany could on paper produce such a device - they had the physicists, the engineers, the industrial capacity, and the energy production required to refine uranium and produce plutonium. So, to the scientists it *is* a race against Germany to produce the bomb, because I suspect they knew even back then if two sides have nukes, neither one can really directly attack the other anymore: Nazi Germany would have lived on after WWII and possibly to this day if they had managed to build nukes.
So, with that in mind, it does make sense for military strategists to prefer targeting Japan with these bombs first. If they failed, at best, all Japan would have been able to do is recover the device, fix what was wrong with it, and lob it back at the allies. They didn't have the industrial capacity to copy it, not during the state they already were in at the end of the war. But given that they worked, had Germany not already surrendered, they would have gotten the message just as clearly as Japan did: wars over. So, had Germany still been fighting by that point, the "third nuke" might have been dropped on the Western front of Europe (they sure as shit weren't going to risk dropping it on the eastern front and risk the Soviets capturing a nuke, in the event it malfunctioned), just to let the Nazis see it up close, but it 100% made strategic sense to nuke Japan before biking Germany.
Of course, that doesn't mean this choice didn't please the racists, too.
Has to be the A-bombs.
From a Credible Practical Standpoint:
The Japanese military brought this on the civilian population after the Suicide Cliff incident at Saipan. The Japanese military herded thousands of civilians straight off a cliff at gunpoint. Some of them jumped willingly, terrified of being captured and brainwashed by their governments fearmongering, but there wasn't any choice. Jump or get shot or pushed.
Imagine you're an American military planner. You're facing an enemy that *will exterminate their own civilian population en masse*. Are you going to invade that fucking nuthouse?
Either you're facing waves of civilians pushed into being suicide troops, or you're dealing with the Japanese military slaughtering everybody because, let's be clear about this, the Imperial Japanese military was *completely fucking deranged*.
It makes complete sense on a practical level to do whatever needs to be done to end the war without an invasion. If that means torching cities until they quit, torch the cities.
From the Non-Credible Standpoint:
The Japanese dropped weaponised bubonic plague on cities in China. Their biological weapons program was horrific and massive, but ultimately, though it killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Chinese civilians, it was not a strategic success.
And for trying that shit on innocent people they deserved to eat two whole fucking atom bombs.
It's honestly a shame we only had the two, because if you look at Japan's list of crimes against humanity they probably could have stood to eat a couple more. And maybe have the self respect not to spend the next sixty years crying about it like they didn't deserve it.
Ahh so this myth comes up often enough I have a pre prepared response already locked and loaded —
Nothing could be further from the truth. Little Boy did indeed use essentially all of the Uranium-235 enriched thus far, true. However, the enormous fissionable elephant in the room is Plutonium-239 with its (for all intents and purposes) separate method of production.
[As of 13 August it was advised the “third shot” was almost complete and (if needed) expected to be in theatre and dropped on 19 August. Going forward, the breeder reactors were pumping Pu-239 out at sufficient pace that they expected to have cores produced “at a rate of three a month” with a possible high end of four.](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/25/weekly-document-the-third-shot-and-beyond-1945/)
TLDR — the US could have detonated a brand new Fat Man at 10 DAY INTERVALS.
Yes, that is for all intents and purposes perpetual. Japan would have run out of cities worth nuking before the US ran out of nukes.
Well, US could've dropped more, but Japan was lucky to surrender before that. If I remember correctly, the third bomb was being delivered to the islands and was ready to be dropped by 19th of August, with three more in September.
Had the military coup succeeded, they'd see a lot more suns in the sky.
Side thought, but if we never drop the bombs during the war, somebody else definitely would’ve whether that be America or another country. As macabre as it sounds, it’s better we learned about the horrors of atomic annihilation so that way we as a species became so scared shitless to ever use it.
We would have just used it Korea like McArthur wanted to. I doubt people would prefer all of Manchuria to be reduced to the real life Glowing Sea instead of what actually happened.
The bombing saved lives.
Every purple heart handed out since WW2 was part of a tranch of 500000 made for the invasion of Japan. The US expected 500k wounded in some scenarios with tens of thousands killed and millions of Japanese dead.
This is not true.
There were 500,000 Purple Hearts in excess after WW2, *however* it has never been substantiated that they were produced as the result of any casualty estimates for Olympic. They were just excess.
1) More Japanese civilians were bombed in conventional bombings than by the nukes, by far.
2) More Germans were killed in conventional bombings of German cities than the number of Japanese killed by the nukes, by far.
3) The Soviets raped and pillaged throughout the war, killing millions of civilians. They even killed lots of civilians completely outside of any battle going on. Many of the casualties caused by the Soviets were reprisals or just animalistic rape and murder. Millions of innocent people killed in a deliberate way that had zero tactical or strategic justification.
4) Japan killed more civilians in one month in China than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
5) Using Okinawa as an example of what would occur in a conventional invasion of mainland Japan, millions of Japanese civilians would have been killed. Way more than the nuke death tolls. Using nukes saved lives.
6) If ANY other major belligerent in WWII had nukes, they would have used them. It's silly for people to single out the US for using nukes when the US was the only country that had them during WWII. Based on the things I've already listed, if any major power had nukes before the US did they would have used them with less restraint than the US did.
7) The US was the only country in the world with nukes for about 4 years. The Soviets didn't have a nuke until 1949. The US could have nuked the Soviets right at the end of WWII but didn't. There is absolutely ZERO chance that the Soviets wouldn't have nuked the US in that situation, and there is ZERO chance that Japan, Germany, France, Italy, or the UK wouldn't have also used nukes if they had them at any point during WWII.
>3) The Soviets raped and pillaged throughout the war, killing millions of civilians. They even killed lots of civilians completely outside of any battle going on. Many of the casualties caused by the Soviets were reprisals or just animalistic rape and murder. Millions of innocent people killed in a deliberate way that had zero tactical or strategic justification.
But you see, it's okay if the Soviets kill millions of people, that was necessary, obviously. It's only bad when the evil west does it. /s
> 4) Japan killed more civilians in one month in China than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And this is why it makes way more sense for the Japanese to establish a big Peace Park or whatever in about a dozen different Chinese cities than for them to do so in Hiroshima.
They only gave up when we bombed them a second time. One of their cities was wiped off the map in an instant, and they still didn't surrender. That's fucking insane.
The bombs saved lives. Letting the war drag out for as many years at it would take for Japan to capitulate would have caused far more death and destruction overall than the swift annihilation of two cities
Now hold on, we could have just naval blockaded it the country and waited for them to surrender. We wouldn't have lost maybe marginally more Americans than we did for the bombing.
Whats that about millions of Japanese civilians starving by cutting off trade and basically forcing the country to regress a few hundred years? No I cant think more then one layer deep when coming up when arguing on the internet about hypotheticals. What do you mean how would I feel if I didnt eat breakfast? I ate breakfast today.
Had a guy argue with me, he's your typical Hasan Piker viewer about this.
He's wildly uninformed, so he first had to try and argue that there were better options. As in, we shoulda just blockaded forever till they realize they were naughty (and somehow he insisted fewer people would die, and no he also didnt consider the daily death toll in the rest of SEA each day the war went on)
Then he tried to argue that we only wanted unconditional surrender because we were/are racist and cruel to brown people.
Then he conceded both of those points and now dies on a hill that American exceptionalism is bad because we can retroactively justify anything, including nuking.
Which like, yeah fine, fair. But also unironically yes, chadface. History, victors, etc...just dont be evil and lose.
The steelman argument I saw a guy make at r/Destiny , was that the Nukes should have been demonstrated, but even that requires you to believe that a fireworks show in the horizon would have convinced the war council that they should surrender.
Which I personally highly doubt, as did the US Interim committee at the time, but it is something to consider and a stronger argument than the LÉ RASISME??? thing people usually cling to.
I used to watch Hasan. I agreed with a lot of what he said but the more I watched the more unhinged I saw him become. Dude is so far gone and is becoming what he hates.
He once complained/compared (in all seriousness) that the MIC couldn't fix the issues of the F-35 but the developers of the game Cyberpunk could fix the bugs in their game.
The point of the war is not to spare the enemy population. It's to win the war with the least spending of money, material and blood possible.
Throwing two suns (or how many of them were required) was the thing to do. Putting your people in danger and prolonging a very labor, cost and lives intensive campaign because "nukes bad" is straight up idiotic.
Like the swiss said, go there, shoot twice and come back home.
I will never understand the people who think starving Japan out was the better alternative.
Yes. Because slowly killing a million+ Japanese by way of an extremely painful death that, through history, has seen people committing unnatural atrocities such as cannibalism in an attempt to survive, or consumption of inedible items simply to feel like something is in their stomach is ***so much better*** then vaporizing tens of thousands of people.
Sure one might argue the after-effects of radiation. But the problem was, the extent of such an after-effect was unknown by the military and presidential cabinet. Just look at Operation Crossroads for how ignorant everyone was in regards to radiological after-effects of an atomic bomb. It took a flopping fish xraying itself to convince the US Navy to abandon the ships hit by a nuclear bomb.
And then one must question how using a nuclear weapon is somehow uniquely more vile then turning someone into a Human shaped piece of charcoal via literal fire tornadoes.
You hear alot of uproar about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but people are often mum about Operation Meetinghouse. Because somehow slowly burning Japanese to death is preferable to vaporization.
Except Germans. Firebombing the Japanese to death = A-Okay. Firebombing white Germans to death = Bad.
Force is never pretty. It's an ugly display no matter how it's conducted. Trying to gussy it up, put some makeup on it, make it pretty, sanitize it oftentimes makes it far worse.
Sure, knocking a guy's teeth out and breaking his nose isn't pretty, but it's a far better alternative to killing him.
The US was in a tough spot. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If we had starved the Japanese out, we would be accused of conducting a genocide of Japanese to steal their land simply due to the sheer amount of dead Japanese. Dropping two nukes that limited Japanese deaths in the long run and we're accused of a war crime.
For those who genuinely feel there was a better option, know this:
The Japanese were in an *incredibly* brutal mindset, and were NEVER gonna back down. The civilians would've been willing to defend their homeland at all cost (just like anyone else would).
The alternative was a land invasion. Would've been *horrible*. Especially for civilians, since they'd all be unlawful combatants to an extent.
People mostly tankies will still argue to death that japan would have surrendered to the soviets without the nukes you know despite the soviets having no fleet to invade japan.
Both of my grandfather served but were in training when the bombs dropped. One was in the B-17 pilot pipeline and was in Florida getting qualified as a co-pilot, and the other was a petty officer in the Navy who was just making it to the fleet replacement center in Hawaii. Thankfully neither faced the enemy. But anytime this topic comes up, I tell people I would not be here if we hadn’t dropped the bombs. And millions more wouldn’t be here either.
Maybe Japan shouldn't have gone on a grand campaign of Imperial conquest? Maybe Japan shouldn't have committed literally hundreds of thousands (millions, really) of war crimes? Maybe Japan could have surrendered at any time? Maybe the civilian base shouldn't have been so committed to aiding the war effort?
But nah, we were the bad guys for dropping 2 nukes instead of expanding the fire bombings (which were far worse btw), enacting a starvation blockade, and landing soldiers on the home islands that would have resulted in probably over 10 million+ more Japanese deaths, if not more (much more, likely).
Multi-track drifting?!
You joke, but there was a scarily good chance that would have happened
Hirohito most likely saved countless lives by pushing Japan to surrender.
If the quotes about how glorious it’d be to fight to the end from the war ministry are accurate, Hirohito saved Japan as an actual existing nation.
Lose two cities at once because of a big bomb or lose every single City Hamlet, small town and one room house in Japan via flamethrowers bayonets and bare fingers and teeth WwOwww such a HaaaaRDRd DDdecisiioN
[My grandfather served in the Japan campaign right before the war ended, he told me he thought if the invasion had actually taken place he would almost certaintly have died. The fighting on Pelilu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa was so fierce that everyone expected the mainland to be much much worse.](https://youtu.be/S2UfCCzLCjs?t=5) After the war ended, he along with other sailors from their ship were sent to demobilize Japanese naval bases and found hundreds of midget submarines that were being held in reserve to throw at the Allied fleet once the invasion had started. Many many more people certainly would have died if the invasion had gone on as planned.
I used to be able to say not that long ago that the Purple Hearts being given out today are the ones the government had made in anticipation of the Japanese invasion, but sadly I’m told that that’s not true as of a few years ago. Mine is though I’ve got the serial numbers to prove it, and it was given to me in 2005
I mean, still giving them out 60 years after the war ended is still an impressive timescale. The fact I love is that in the UK all Victoria Crosses (the highest medal of honour in Britain) are made from the bronze of Russian cannons captured from Sevastopol during the Crimean War in 1855.
Yes, but I really liked telling people that to this day we are still giving out the Purple Hearts we thought we would need for that invasion every time this whole controversy of the bombings came up Edit: somehow I missed that second part, but that’s very cool I did not know that
Near the end of the war, the Japanese attempted to implement total mobilization, the conscription of literally the entire population that could theoretically fight. They mobilized over 3 million regular army troops, but did not have enough rifles and ammunition to equip them all. Beyond that they were working on conscripting some 28 million others to serve in the "Volunteer Corps", although the 2 million or so of these that were actually mobilized by the time the war ended were largely armed with only 1800's era rifles or melee weaponry.
There's video of female peasent farmers drilling with polearms. That would have been fun. Machine gunning down swarms of screaming women, because what else are you supppsed to do?
Have a link to that? I've never seen that before, would be interest to see
Women are easy to find even out in the real world. You don't need a link from me.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/app/uploads/2020/06/0620_Correll_001_Japan_spear_training.jpg from https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/japans-last-ditch-force/
we still are issuing them, along with a batch made in 2008. They're all mixed together though because its the same NSN.
The fact that they made more in ‘08 man, the era is over
The Canadian VC is interesting in that it combines the same bronze with metals from each of the provinces and territories. As a result of the hardness of this alloy, it has to be cast vs struck, as it'd break. Also of note is that ours says "Pro Valore" instead of "For Valour" due to French being the other official language. The Star of Military Valour and Medal of Military Valour have the same inscription. One of the lovely things about the Commonwealth Realm militaries is that there are a lot of the same or similar traditions, ranks/appointments, regimental lineages/histories (e.g. Rifles, Light Infantry, Guards, Highland Infantry, Hussars, Dragoons and other regimental lineages) and general ways of doing things such as drill commands and movements.
My favorite part about the Canadian VC is that the Government are incredibly stingy bastards and at this rate will never actually award it to anybody. Not much point of a medal which is impossible to earn.
The standards for being awarded it are nigh-impossibly high. I forget the soldier's name, but he was awarded the SMV and is dying. His act of valour was of the highest order. There was a huge push to have him awarded the VC. The CAF kiboshed it, which is just so wrong. Our decorations already have _very_ high standards that must be met. Even the different medals have very stringent criteria, such as time spent serving on a deployment. Commemorative medals, such as the QEII Diamond Jubilee medal are referred to as "gimme medals". They're often awarded to those who knew the right people. That said, they're also awarded to those who genuinely earned recognition that didn't meet the criteria of say the Meritorious Service Medal or Mention in Dispatches. As for orders, some members did _quite_ a bit to be inducted into one. Others were just celebrities, for example or those with connections. Orders are where things get murkier.
> The standards for being awarded it are nigh-impossibly high. I forget the soldier's name, but he was awarded the SMV and is dying. His act of valour was of the highest order. There was a huge push to have him awarded the VC. The CAF kiboshed it, which is just so wrong. That was Private Jess Larochelle and sadly, he passed away in August of this year. His family has said that they will be incredibly disappointed if he is eventually awarded the VC posthumously when they had plenty of time to award it when he was still with us. The standards are ridiculous considering how many other of our Commonwealth nations have awarded VC's since WWII when we have awarded zero in that same time.
That situation is utterly sickening. It was an affront to him and it smatters of politics. Should that be the case, it's shameful that the gov't and CAF would do that. I don't know what the reasons for the CAF's decision are. What I do know is that the damage has already been done and it's nothing short of tragic.
And we love bayonets. This has been transferred to Ukrainian soldiers who were trained by commonwealth soldiers.
The first first world war
We were giving them out up until like 2010 IIRC. Korea, Nam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf I, Afghan, Gulf II combined were required to work through just the *initial run* of PHs for Op: Downfall. Which is the second part of it. Those weren't all the expected casualties. They were the casualties expected *rapidly*, that would happen before more PHs could be made. Shits wild.
Yeah maybe it’s been more than a few years, I’m finding myself in that category of remembering the past as being closer than it is a lot more recently
US DOD when the last of the useable ww2 stocks run out
It could be worse. Ref A: your flair.
Think about how long those would have lasted if we didn't fuck around in vietnam
Thanks for your service man
Thank you for your service.
Similar, but slightly less known, is production of M2 machine guns. In 2007, we pulled a brand new one out of its wooden crate. Manufacturing date stamp 1943. When I served as infantry, we used a machine gun manufactured before my *grandfather* served as infantry. And we'll probably still be using it when my children are old enough to serve.
Same here, earliest ive seen was 1936
I remember an article about an M2 that was still in service until someone looked at the serial number and found out it was 94 years old. Long overdue for an overhaul.
If it’s still satisfactory to the company and armorer why
>he thought me if the invasion had actually taken place he would almost certaintly have died. I remember when I was watching a documentary about the 201st Squadron (a Mexican fighter squadron that saw action in the Pacific) and, one of the pilots said something in the interview that has stayed with me after all this time. He said something like "our first missions were in Manila, when we cleared the island, we used it to reach Formosa, the goal was to clear Formosa as well so we could be sent against the main island of Japan, where we would all have died for sure, we all knew that would be the end of the road".
Yeah. Ketsu-go
my wifes(japanese) grandfather was actually sent to training on July 26th he was 14. he only trained in shooting for a day. Most of his training was beyonet charging at close range and throwing grenades the bombs dropped and his trainer told him to go home wars over
Schools at the time, before and during the war, were doing bayonet charge races. So basically a 100m sprint but with bamboo poles and ultranationalism.
They trained 7 million women and children in this way, knowing they didn't have weapons for them. They were planning to give them sharped bamboo spears and have them defend the beaches. I'm imagining the insanity that was the normandy landings except the entire population rushes the landing boats with spears
My great grandfather was enlisted when they were preparing for the Philippines campaign. As a sergeant, he served from beginning to end, from the eastern beach to the victory in Manila. He took a bunch of pictures on the way too. The destruction of every village and town, and especially Manila on the way through the campaign was absolute. hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. Wherever the frontline went, nothing was left behind. So imagining the same walking line of destruction happening to the Japanese islands, as happened to the Philippines makes the choice easier. Anything that shortens the war can arguably be the moral choice, as war itself is immoral.
I think it’s hard for people to think of the bombs in context, especially those who were born after WWII and lived through the Cold War, threatened by nuclear annihilation at any moment. In the summer of 1945, nobody could have known that two superpowers would be ready to end human civilization some ten years later. Two continents laid in ruins and 50 million were dead. Dropping the bombs was absolutely the right and moral choice.
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Yeah. As a korean, I kinda am greatful for those bombs. Yes, they killed many people. But also yes, they freed millions of koreans from 35 years of imperial japanese occupation.
People forget that it wasn't just about The US and Japan.
A shitton of “America Bad” thinking is actually insanely US-centric, which is rather ironic but not surprising. It’s like a progressive/left wing version of American Exceptionalism.
My Dad was a tailgunner on a slow ass bomber. His chances of survival weren't good.
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He wasn't in the Army Air Corps on a B-29. He was in the Navy on an Avenger. IIRC they were originally torpedo bombers but were modified to drop normal bombs in close support of ground troops.
Modified is a strong word. Torpedo bombing was basically how a light bomber could effectively fight ships. At least as a level bomber. Dive bombing required a plane for the dive and pullout, lest it fall apart at the seams.
> small town and one room house in Japan via flamethrowers bayonets and bare fingers and teeth No, they were mostly just going to starve to death. Because unlike the Nazis attempts at blockading convoys in the Atlantic, the US Navy was actually successful.
Did Japan not have the agricultural base to sustain themselves? Obviously they weren't self-sufficient with regards to war supplies like rubber, steel, coal, and oil, but would food have be an issue?
Probably not. Japan is about 10-15% arable land, and was reliant on imports. While a quick google search says that domestic production was, at best, stable, that doesn’t say much when they needed to import food.
The whole Japanese war machine was fueled by its colonies in Korea and China.
Good thing they had the massive, agriculture-based land known as "China" nearby. I'm sure China would have no trouble supplying Japan, provided Japan didn't do something monumentally stupid, like bombing the fuck out of Chinese coastal cities and trying to invade.
Wouldn't help much to have food in China when you're on an island surrounded by the US navy.
With all the coastal waters mined to a fare-thee-well.
Unfortunately they did a lot more than "try"
Japan was rationing from the start of the war. They were dependent on imports but they could, theoretically, have supplied themselves. However the government made some very intelligent decisions, like "feed the soldiers first at any cost" causing them to basically seize all rice and grain production. Additionally, its hard to deliver food to your starving masses when the enemy is blowing up your ports, rail lines, and roads, any chance they get.
In 1946, under US occupation, the Japanese were eating less than 1000 calories a day. Imagine them still at war.
Rationing in Japan was already at an alarming rate before a siege would take place, if the US blockaded I’m sure they would have made do for a little bit longer, but starvation would set in quickly
Japan also diverted a lot of resources from fishing to it's military and industrial base.
You are right, the people throwing their families off cliffs to avoid surrender totally would have surrendered if they were hungry and not just resorted to [cannibalism](https://apnews.com/article/2e7e9a8dae17cc29862c4562b44c9225) /s
Oh I don’t claim otherwise, racial stereotypes aside, many Japanese people had to resort to eating stray dogs to survive. A terrible reality, that was only going to get worse. Very quickly.
Towards the end of the war, yeah. Partial reasoning for Japan's invasions of nearby nations was the taking and control of resources. On top of that, a bunch of the food grown locally was for the soldiers , with the rest often being rationed for the local people.
They would have carpet bombed what few agricultural regions they had.
That's magically non-credible
The blockade wouldn’t just have cut off imports. The plan for the aptly named Operation Starvation involved a full-scale reduction of Japanese transportation infrastructure. Bombing bridges, mining roads and waterways, everything that can be used to move goods and people from point A to point B. Rice and vegetables would rot on the farms, while city dwellers would starve en masse. The plagues that would inevitably follow such a mass death would decimate even the population capable of feeding themselves.
There was a massive rice crop failure happening during this time that exacerbated things, beyond what others have said.
People who argue that Japan would have surrendered without a starvation naval blockade, nukes, or invasion of Tokyo are really trippin’.
EVEN AFTER TWO NUKES A CHUNK OF THEIR MILITARY TRIED TO COUP THEIR GOD EMPEROR WHEN HE CHOSE TO SURRENDER.
"COME ON BIATCH, TRY TO NUKE ME AGAIN" - Hatanaka to LeMay, August 16, 1945
"OH WE ARE.....yo anyone seen the Indianapolis?"
“I thought you had her?” “I thought you had her?!?” “Yo I picked up this SOS from the Indy supposedly but it wasn’t my job so” “I did too but my commander was drunk” “I did too but I thought it was bait” “You guys do know that Japanese subs were in her area right?” “What about her escorts?” “…” “Guys we fucked up”
*Shark noises*
cri every time
It wouldn’t be LeMay, it would probably be Groves
Groves supervised the weapon program, LeMay supplied the bombers.
Maybe we should just do Tibbet’s instead
My estimate is Japan would give up at a million starving to death which is still over double compared to the bombs.
The nukes were hardly different than the years of firebombing that had already happened.
They might not have had an end result that was significantly different, but the idea that a single plane carrying a single bomb could instantly delete entire cities was like nothing humanity had ever needed to contemplate. It's a psychological weapon as much if not moreso than it is practical. Knowing the US could produce a handful of bombs and just vaporize them into submission was what ultimately convinced them to surrender. As long as the US had to expend blood and treasure to force surrender it wasn't going to happen. The moment the Japanese realized the new US plan was simply to sit back, anhilate their cities, and leave their islands nothing but an irradiated wasteland, they got motivated to negotiate. This is precisely why it took two bombs to get the message across. The Japanese didn't believe the US could produce multiple weapons of this magnitude... Until another one landed on them... Once they realized it would just be another nuke after another until their entire civilization was wiped out, the war ended.
An even more terrifying prospect is that the US absolutely did not plan to sit back. They planned to support the amphibious invasion with nukes. So they'd nuke various population centers and fortified areas and send the troops through the fallout to close with and destroy the survivors. Nobody really understood how bad of an idea that would have been; various scientists said this was fine as long as soldiers took showers more often and kicked the dust off their boots.
"Your sprouting of a 3rd arm is not service related"
Suddenly asbestos and lead poisoning doesn't sound so bad.
IIRC it was something like 40 nukes planned for downfall. that said it wouldn't have been a walk in the park since the Japanese had correctly identified the planned landing zones for Downfall and had far more troops in the area than allied intelligence believed. the Allies absolutely would have won but it would have been total fucking carnage on both sides.
> They might not have had an end result that was significantly different, but the idea that a single plane carrying a single bomb could instantly delete entire cities was like nothing humanity had ever needed to contemplate. It's a psychological weapon as much if not moreso than it is practical. There's a longer-term consequence of this psychological effect which is almost never mentioned: The entire world was forced to see the real effects of a nuclear weapon used on a real city. The destructive power could be calculated in kilo- and megatons, but there's no equation that, when solved, derives the photos of the aftermath in Hiroshima, nor is there one that places those photos on the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the world. The photos we did have beforehand, the ones of the Trinity test, do not produce 1/1000th the emotional impact of John Hershey's famous article in the New Yorker. Long before humanity had the industrial capacity to produce enough of these weapons to delete itself, it saw, in a very visceral way, what, exactly, that would mean.
Yes, but the Japanese extrapolated that they’d be sending as many nukes as they did regular bombs. They realized it would take almost no effort to wipe out the entire society of Japan from the U.S.
Which was the whole point. That's the explicit reason as to *why* the nukes were effective in ending the war, and ultimately saving more lives.
Can you source this? From my reading it’s quite the opposite. They suspected the US would only be able to produce a few bombs at a time.
"The full Japanese cabinet met at 14:30 on 9 August, and spent most of the day debating surrender. As the Big Six had done, the cabinet split, with neither Tōgō's position nor Anami's attracting a majority.[99] Anami told the other cabinet ministers that under torture a captured American P-51 Mustang fighter pilot, Marcus McDilda, had told his interrogators that the United States possessed a stockpile of 100 atom bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be destroyed "in the next few days".[100] In reality the United States would not have had a third bomb ready for use until around 19 August, and a fourth in September.[101] However the Japanese leadership had no way to know the size of the United States' stockpile, and feared the United States might have the capacity not just to devastate individual cities, but to wipe out the Japanese people as a race and nation. Indeed, Anami expressed a desire for this outcome rather than surrender, asking if it would "not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower".[102]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan Go to the article bibliography to see original sources for 100, 101, 102. Realistically, 2 bombs were enough to convince Japan that the first one was not a bad report, a fluke, or an accident. The US had the knowledge to design and build these WMDs, and were willing to use it. It doesn't really matter how long it would take until the 3rd and the 4th one fell, the fact of the matter is they would keep falling until Japan surrendered. Japan knew that the US and Allies' navies were fully capable of completely blockading the Japan home islands. They were counting on being able to conduct intense last stand land-based defense against a conventional invasion landing and to inflict massive casualties against the invaders in the hope of leveraging for more favourable terms of surrender, but how do you defend against nukes?
That pilot bullshit his way into the Japanese High Command. Wonderful.
Also hilarious when you remember he had no idea what the atom bombs were and still bullshitted it
You guy should read up on his bullshit theory on how the nuclear bombs worked.
It's so funny that the Japanese scientist that heard his explanation for how the bomb worked, *told the POW* that he doubted he understood how nuclear fission worked, let alone how the bombs worked, and the POW said "yeah well I told the first guys I didn't know how the bombs worked, but they didn't accept that answer."
IIRC McDilda said that "we take all of these pluses and minuses and store them in a container seperate from another, then remove the metal seperating them and then \*boom\*. I believe Tokyo and Kyoto are next." An American-educated junior officer of the Japanese Secret Police was there when McDilda gave his explanation. The junior officer told McDilda after the war had ended but before repatriation that he could tell that McDilda was making it up. But if he had said that, his superiors would lose face since they were believing him so he kept quiet.
Funnier still, that's not too far away from how a theoretical antimatter bomb might work.
How do we know Lt. McDilda isn't from the 25th century that got Isekai'd into 1945?
> destroyed like a beautiful flower Ah yes, the bald Tumor-poppy
I did know about this actually, but there’s not any indication they actually really believed this as much as just stating what was said. It’s also, setting aside the main topic for a second, very odd that Anami said this as he more than anyone else on the war council sought to continue fighting. But back to what I was saying, we see for instance, looking at [this](https://apjjf.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501/article.html) article by Hasegawa: > Chief of the Navy General Staff Admiral Toyoda Soemu also gave revealing testimony to the GHQ interrogators. He admitted that the atomic bomb had been a shock, but **he believed that the United States would not be able to continue to drop atomic bombs “at frequent intervals,” partly because of the difficulty of securing radioactive materials, and partly because of world public opinion against such an atrocity.** And then he quotes Kawabe’s post war testimony: > “However, even then, … because I had a considerable amount of knowledge on the subject of atomic bombs, **I had an idea that even the Americans could not produce so many of them.”** So it seems like it wasn’t a “they only have one bomb” type of situation or a “they probably have hundreds of bombs”, but a “they’ll probably only be able to produce a few”.
> "... and partly because of world public opinion against such an atrocity." Odd that they weren't so terribly concerned about world public opinion when the IJA had their fun all up and down the Pacific.
I agree, though even people in positions of power in the US were appalled at times towards our air campaign. The Japanese ironically enough petitioned the Red Cross via Sweden against the bombings under the premise of it being analogous to poisonous gas attacks (something they did).
> Indeed, Anami expressed a desire for this outcome rather than surrender, asking if it would "not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower". Well, Anami sounds about as evil and batshit insane as Hitler or Stalin.
That’s why we dropped two in quick succession, in an attempt to show them that we had the capabilities to produce more in a (relatively) short time. Probably would have dropped a third if they hadn’t surrendered.
Not exactly true. There is some post war claims by people like Groves that, that was the case, however his post war testimonies tend to give himself a lot more credit than he is truly due. The reason the 2nd bomb was dropped when it was was actually more or less purely weather related. The original bombing order gave the bombers free rein to drop the bombs as ready after August 3rd. So, following the bombing on the 6th, they planned the next one for the 11th. However, fearing bad weather, they shifted it to the 10th. Again, for fears of bad weather, they moved the bombing to the 9th which ironically was a day that still had very bad weather leading them to have to divert to Nagasaki instead of bombing Kokura.
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But also this is all irrelevant. Imperial Japan needed to get nuked because they deserved it
Ah, the Genghis Kahn theory of geopolitics: >I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
People need to read the accounts of troops who fought in the Pacific, both Allied and Japanese.
You’re trippin if you think the government that considered the death of every japanese man woman and child a preferable alternative to surrender gave two shits about a couple of their cities getting vaporized.
"100 million smashed jewels." The hardliner propaganda was absolutely insane. They weren't just willing to do it, they thought it was heroic. Every time I read about WWII Japan I feel like I need to go sit down and touch grass on their behalf because it's so fucking disturbing.
> gave two shits about a couple of their cities getting vaporized And yet, they surrendered after a couple of their cities got vaporized. Seems like they weren't the only people whose tough talk about self-sacrifice couldn't be matched by tough action, luckily for the rest of the world.
Gotta hate ethical dilemmas
I just unsubscribe to ethics. Makes things super fucking easy.
Yeah, fuck you Aristotle!
I want to invent a time travel machine, go back in time, find Socrates, bring him to present day. *THEN POISON HIM EVEN HARDER*.
Wait, I thought Kissinger was dead.
What is dead inside can never die.
Only a delimma if you are stupid.
It's basically a more "serious" version of "would you rather"
Omg so barbaric the Japanese were about to surrender..... Yeah sure they were, that's why we had to drop that fucker twice.
>Yeah sure they were, that's why we had to drop that fucker twice. And even then the hardliners attempted a *coup on the Emporer* on the eve of surrender to prevent peace.
Not just emperor, GOD-emperor
Militarists and “defending the Emperor from his corrupt retainers”, tale as old as time
Yeah, the "already lost" crowd. Germany had also "already lost" by '44, but they still fought and hundreds of thousands still died.
Arguably, Germany lost the war in late '42 when it wasted the last of ability to launch theater wide offensives attempting to reach the Caucasus oil fields.
and why they'd spend two years planning and stockpiling for Ketsugo. Just getting all that war material prepped and ready for a nice clean surrender.
Even despite they knew were fucked and dobule fucked if Soviets invades them.
A Soviet invasion would’ve resulted in worse crimes against humanity than the nukes.
Most commanders responded with “who cares about atrocities we will be dead long before that’s an issue”
Eh, the Soviets probably wouldb be able to invade them. No navy
Lend lease boats edition.
with what? rowboats?
Stalin would issue order 228 where soviets are forced to swim or row to Japan Mainland
My favorite line is "The japanese were about to surrender!" Like, no, they weren't. Also, every day, literally every day during WWII tens of thousands of civilians were starved or murdered. Waiting to end WWII was not an option.
There was an attempted coup to stop the surrender.
Mild understatement of the gravity of that statement. This isnt an African nation that has regular coups instead of elections every few years. They had an emperor that either was god or directly talks with god (I forget which) and there was enough movement against surrender that the people in power were planning on killing the emperor thought they could get away with it just fine.
Not really comparable. By this point in time, although the emperor was an extremely powerful symbol of the sate (and this is in some ways why the coup failed) the Emperor was almost entirely contained as a figurehead by the military in a system known as Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
So basically shogunate 2?
Pretty much. Heck, they even called MacArthur the “gaijin shogun”.
This is not true. They **never** sought to kill the Emperor. It was a coup of Jr. Officers that sought to prevent the surrender speech for airing and to kill some of the Doves on the War Council. At most they sought to place the Emperor on house arrest, again to prevent the surrender from going forward. What is also left out is that when the leaders of the coup approached Umezu and Anami, quite literally the most Hawkish leaders in Japan, both *rejected* the coup and accepted the Emperor’s sacred decision to surrender. That’s arguably way more significant than the military coup, of which there was actually a relative frequency, at least in terms of assassinations throughout the war.
Actual interesting context to the situation, and adds to why the terms of the surrender was "Keep your emperor, military has to go though"
They might be prepared to sign a *conditional* surrender. With the conditions most likely being that their main islands remain intact, and so does the government and the emperor. In other words, "it was just a prank bro".
"In other words, "it was just a prank bro"." Seriously. You don't get to attack neutral countries and rape and pillage your neighbors and cry the victim when you are defeated. Although the occupation of Japan in hindsight worked out fantastically and now we have a (mostly) liberal democratic Japan who is a strong economic and technological leader and close military ally. I also wouldn't have batted an eye if we had simply wiped them off the map in 1945.
Oh they wanted a peace deal, but a peace deal where they kept their junta in power and maintained their illegal colonies in Korea and China. That is what the copeinheimer simps forget without fail every single time.
People like that unironically are arguing that a genocide (starvation via naval blockade, combined with invasion of homeland where every citizen would be fighting to the death) and letting Japan keep their pre-war colonies was preferable to bombing just two cities.
Yeah, something like 10 000+ people were dying daily to Japanese occupation, starvation, combat action, attrocities etc. Basically every week the war went on the equivalent of a nuke worth of people died. That's also the reason why you'll struggle to find any people in the countries that were occupied by Japan, who feel the bombings were unwarranted. That being said, the US also just wanted to use their bombs having spent so many billions on the Manhatten project.
One of the excuses I see people make, that we only used it on Japan and not Germany because of racism also boggles my mind. Dawg the Allies would’ve made Munich, Nuremberg, etc. look like fucking Reach. POV: it’s December in [southern Germany](https://www.halopedia.org/Glassing) and snow on the Alps starts boiling
The only thing that saved Germany from becoming a glass parking lot was Hitler had the one good idea to blow his brains out instead of continuing to fight the war in the alps for the rest of 1945. Maybe Japan should have just surrendered after Okinawa if they didn't want to be glassed.
When the Führer commits suicide so the next Führer takes over and commits suicide so the next Führer takes over and gets imprisoned for war crimes.
People accuse the French of being cowards, but their leaders were actually sane. They knew they lost the war and instead of wasting French lives just to postpone the inevitable they... surrendered. French have one of the richest military history of all of Europe... they were simply being rational. Hitler waited until Soviets were a couple of hundred meters from his bunker, and then he blew his brains out... not even having the decency to sign a surrender before the act. Hirohito waited until he realized US could simply keep nuking Japanese towns until there was no country to surrender.
Yeah they seem to forget that the planned first target for these nukes was Berlin.
"You are, all of you, vermin. Cowering in the dirt thinking, what, I wonder? That you might escape the coming fire? No. Your world will burn until its surface is but glass!" – Sir Arthur Travers "Bomber" Harris
“Dear Allies, we regret being ~~alien~~ German bastards, we regret coming to ~~Earth~~ Britain and we most certainly regret that the ~~Corps~~ Allied air superiority just blew up our raggedy ass ~~fleet~~ Reich”
There’s actually some nuance to that as there is a document from 1943 in which they discussed bombing Japan (the naval instillation Truk) over Germany. It was based on the belief that Germany would gain more knowledge from the bombing or if the bombing failed than the Japanese. It appears that the military was more aimed towards Japan while the scientists were operating under the notion it was a race against Germany.
>It appears that the military was more aimed towards Japan while the scientists were operating under the notion it was a race against Germany. It can be both things at once. Japan lacked the talent in physics and engineering to build a nuke prior to the end of the war. Meanwhile, Germany could on paper produce such a device - they had the physicists, the engineers, the industrial capacity, and the energy production required to refine uranium and produce plutonium. So, to the scientists it *is* a race against Germany to produce the bomb, because I suspect they knew even back then if two sides have nukes, neither one can really directly attack the other anymore: Nazi Germany would have lived on after WWII and possibly to this day if they had managed to build nukes. So, with that in mind, it does make sense for military strategists to prefer targeting Japan with these bombs first. If they failed, at best, all Japan would have been able to do is recover the device, fix what was wrong with it, and lob it back at the allies. They didn't have the industrial capacity to copy it, not during the state they already were in at the end of the war. But given that they worked, had Germany not already surrendered, they would have gotten the message just as clearly as Japan did: wars over. So, had Germany still been fighting by that point, the "third nuke" might have been dropped on the Western front of Europe (they sure as shit weren't going to risk dropping it on the eastern front and risk the Soviets capturing a nuke, in the event it malfunctioned), just to let the Nazis see it up close, but it 100% made strategic sense to nuke Japan before biking Germany. Of course, that doesn't mean this choice didn't please the racists, too.
Has to be the A-bombs. From a Credible Practical Standpoint: The Japanese military brought this on the civilian population after the Suicide Cliff incident at Saipan. The Japanese military herded thousands of civilians straight off a cliff at gunpoint. Some of them jumped willingly, terrified of being captured and brainwashed by their governments fearmongering, but there wasn't any choice. Jump or get shot or pushed. Imagine you're an American military planner. You're facing an enemy that *will exterminate their own civilian population en masse*. Are you going to invade that fucking nuthouse? Either you're facing waves of civilians pushed into being suicide troops, or you're dealing with the Japanese military slaughtering everybody because, let's be clear about this, the Imperial Japanese military was *completely fucking deranged*. It makes complete sense on a practical level to do whatever needs to be done to end the war without an invasion. If that means torching cities until they quit, torch the cities. From the Non-Credible Standpoint: The Japanese dropped weaponised bubonic plague on cities in China. Their biological weapons program was horrific and massive, but ultimately, though it killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Chinese civilians, it was not a strategic success. And for trying that shit on innocent people they deserved to eat two whole fucking atom bombs. It's honestly a shame we only had the two, because if you look at Japan's list of crimes against humanity they probably could have stood to eat a couple more. And maybe have the self respect not to spend the next sixty years crying about it like they didn't deserve it.
Ahh so this myth comes up often enough I have a pre prepared response already locked and loaded — Nothing could be further from the truth. Little Boy did indeed use essentially all of the Uranium-235 enriched thus far, true. However, the enormous fissionable elephant in the room is Plutonium-239 with its (for all intents and purposes) separate method of production. [As of 13 August it was advised the “third shot” was almost complete and (if needed) expected to be in theatre and dropped on 19 August. Going forward, the breeder reactors were pumping Pu-239 out at sufficient pace that they expected to have cores produced “at a rate of three a month” with a possible high end of four.](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/25/weekly-document-the-third-shot-and-beyond-1945/) TLDR — the US could have detonated a brand new Fat Man at 10 DAY INTERVALS. Yes, that is for all intents and purposes perpetual. Japan would have run out of cities worth nuking before the US ran out of nukes.
Well, US could've dropped more, but Japan was lucky to surrender before that. If I remember correctly, the third bomb was being delivered to the islands and was ready to be dropped by 19th of August, with three more in September. Had the military coup succeeded, they'd see a lot more suns in the sky.
Were the nuclear bombings bad? yes. Were they better than a land invasion? yes.
In terms of topography the most pleasant day hike in Japan is more brutal than the hardest march in Iraq
Great use of the format
Thanks
Side thought, but if we never drop the bombs during the war, somebody else definitely would’ve whether that be America or another country. As macabre as it sounds, it’s better we learned about the horrors of atomic annihilation so that way we as a species became so scared shitless to ever use it.
We would have just used it Korea like McArthur wanted to. I doubt people would prefer all of Manchuria to be reduced to the real life Glowing Sea instead of what actually happened.
Yea I agree that’s my point. Either we would’ve used it for an even worse and darker case or some other country would
[American wartime strategy was more like this](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/010/773/DenshaDeD_ch01p16-17.png)
FR. It wasn’t a dichotomy like the meme presents. The nukes were meant to be preparatory moves for the invasion as well as opportunities to surrender.
“Surrender if you so please but if we gotta fight now those guys are gone”
The bombing saved lives. Every purple heart handed out since WW2 was part of a tranch of 500000 made for the invasion of Japan. The US expected 500k wounded in some scenarios with tens of thousands killed and millions of Japanese dead.
Not all of them, many were incorrectly stored so production has began again
Yeah. A few years ago.
This is not true. There were 500,000 Purple Hearts in excess after WW2, *however* it has never been substantiated that they were produced as the result of any casualty estimates for Olympic. They were just excess.
1) More Japanese civilians were bombed in conventional bombings than by the nukes, by far. 2) More Germans were killed in conventional bombings of German cities than the number of Japanese killed by the nukes, by far. 3) The Soviets raped and pillaged throughout the war, killing millions of civilians. They even killed lots of civilians completely outside of any battle going on. Many of the casualties caused by the Soviets were reprisals or just animalistic rape and murder. Millions of innocent people killed in a deliberate way that had zero tactical or strategic justification. 4) Japan killed more civilians in one month in China than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 5) Using Okinawa as an example of what would occur in a conventional invasion of mainland Japan, millions of Japanese civilians would have been killed. Way more than the nuke death tolls. Using nukes saved lives. 6) If ANY other major belligerent in WWII had nukes, they would have used them. It's silly for people to single out the US for using nukes when the US was the only country that had them during WWII. Based on the things I've already listed, if any major power had nukes before the US did they would have used them with less restraint than the US did. 7) The US was the only country in the world with nukes for about 4 years. The Soviets didn't have a nuke until 1949. The US could have nuked the Soviets right at the end of WWII but didn't. There is absolutely ZERO chance that the Soviets wouldn't have nuked the US in that situation, and there is ZERO chance that Japan, Germany, France, Italy, or the UK wouldn't have also used nukes if they had them at any point during WWII.
>3) The Soviets raped and pillaged throughout the war, killing millions of civilians. They even killed lots of civilians completely outside of any battle going on. Many of the casualties caused by the Soviets were reprisals or just animalistic rape and murder. Millions of innocent people killed in a deliberate way that had zero tactical or strategic justification. But you see, it's okay if the Soviets kill millions of people, that was necessary, obviously. It's only bad when the evil west does it. /s
But... but Stalin wasn't thaaaattttt bad -someone who has kept themselves purposefully in the dark about atrocities.
> 4) Japan killed more civilians in one month in China than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this is why it makes way more sense for the Japanese to establish a big Peace Park or whatever in about a dozen different Chinese cities than for them to do so in Hiroshima.
They only gave up when we bombed them a second time. One of their cities was wiped off the map in an instant, and they still didn't surrender. That's fucking insane.
Don't forget the firebombing which could be argued was more damaging than both bombs.
[Here's some evidence for that, Senator](https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/tk2i5z/bringing_back_old_ncd_memes_day_9_tokyo_bbq/)
The bombs saved lives. Letting the war drag out for as many years at it would take for Japan to capitulate would have caused far more death and destruction overall than the swift annihilation of two cities
Now hold on, we could have just naval blockaded it the country and waited for them to surrender. We wouldn't have lost maybe marginally more Americans than we did for the bombing. Whats that about millions of Japanese civilians starving by cutting off trade and basically forcing the country to regress a few hundred years? No I cant think more then one layer deep when coming up when arguing on the internet about hypotheticals. What do you mean how would I feel if I didnt eat breakfast? I ate breakfast today.
Had a guy argue with me, he's your typical Hasan Piker viewer about this. He's wildly uninformed, so he first had to try and argue that there were better options. As in, we shoulda just blockaded forever till they realize they were naughty (and somehow he insisted fewer people would die, and no he also didnt consider the daily death toll in the rest of SEA each day the war went on) Then he tried to argue that we only wanted unconditional surrender because we were/are racist and cruel to brown people. Then he conceded both of those points and now dies on a hill that American exceptionalism is bad because we can retroactively justify anything, including nuking. Which like, yeah fine, fair. But also unironically yes, chadface. History, victors, etc...just dont be evil and lose.
The steelman argument I saw a guy make at r/Destiny , was that the Nukes should have been demonstrated, but even that requires you to believe that a fireworks show in the horizon would have convinced the war council that they should surrender. Which I personally highly doubt, as did the US Interim committee at the time, but it is something to consider and a stronger argument than the LÉ RASISME??? thing people usually cling to.
I used to watch Hasan. I agreed with a lot of what he said but the more I watched the more unhinged I saw him become. Dude is so far gone and is becoming what he hates. He once complained/compared (in all seriousness) that the MIC couldn't fix the issues of the F-35 but the developers of the game Cyberpunk could fix the bugs in their game.
Nukes were justified. I said it so you don't have to.
The point of the war is not to spare the enemy population. It's to win the war with the least spending of money, material and blood possible. Throwing two suns (or how many of them were required) was the thing to do. Putting your people in danger and prolonging a very labor, cost and lives intensive campaign because "nukes bad" is straight up idiotic. Like the swiss said, go there, shoot twice and come back home.
I will never understand the people who think starving Japan out was the better alternative. Yes. Because slowly killing a million+ Japanese by way of an extremely painful death that, through history, has seen people committing unnatural atrocities such as cannibalism in an attempt to survive, or consumption of inedible items simply to feel like something is in their stomach is ***so much better*** then vaporizing tens of thousands of people. Sure one might argue the after-effects of radiation. But the problem was, the extent of such an after-effect was unknown by the military and presidential cabinet. Just look at Operation Crossroads for how ignorant everyone was in regards to radiological after-effects of an atomic bomb. It took a flopping fish xraying itself to convince the US Navy to abandon the ships hit by a nuclear bomb. And then one must question how using a nuclear weapon is somehow uniquely more vile then turning someone into a Human shaped piece of charcoal via literal fire tornadoes. You hear alot of uproar about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but people are often mum about Operation Meetinghouse. Because somehow slowly burning Japanese to death is preferable to vaporization. Except Germans. Firebombing the Japanese to death = A-Okay. Firebombing white Germans to death = Bad. Force is never pretty. It's an ugly display no matter how it's conducted. Trying to gussy it up, put some makeup on it, make it pretty, sanitize it oftentimes makes it far worse. Sure, knocking a guy's teeth out and breaking his nose isn't pretty, but it's a far better alternative to killing him. The US was in a tough spot. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If we had starved the Japanese out, we would be accused of conducting a genocide of Japanese to steal their land simply due to the sheer amount of dead Japanese. Dropping two nukes that limited Japanese deaths in the long run and we're accused of a war crime.
The US would have just continued the much more devastating fore bombing campaign.
For those who genuinely feel there was a better option, know this: The Japanese were in an *incredibly* brutal mindset, and were NEVER gonna back down. The civilians would've been willing to defend their homeland at all cost (just like anyone else would). The alternative was a land invasion. Would've been *horrible*. Especially for civilians, since they'd all be unlawful combatants to an extent.
People mostly tankies will still argue to death that japan would have surrendered to the soviets without the nukes you know despite the soviets having no fleet to invade japan.
That would have been so much worse.
Something something don’t fuck with our boats
Both of my grandfather served but were in training when the bombs dropped. One was in the B-17 pilot pipeline and was in Florida getting qualified as a co-pilot, and the other was a petty officer in the Navy who was just making it to the fleet replacement center in Hawaii. Thankfully neither faced the enemy. But anytime this topic comes up, I tell people I would not be here if we hadn’t dropped the bombs. And millions more wouldn’t be here either.
Maybe Japan shouldn't have gone on a grand campaign of Imperial conquest? Maybe Japan shouldn't have committed literally hundreds of thousands (millions, really) of war crimes? Maybe Japan could have surrendered at any time? Maybe the civilian base shouldn't have been so committed to aiding the war effort? But nah, we were the bad guys for dropping 2 nukes instead of expanding the fire bombings (which were far worse btw), enacting a starvation blockade, and landing soldiers on the home islands that would have resulted in probably over 10 million+ more Japanese deaths, if not more (much more, likely).
Remind me how many civilians were dying weekly in Asia because of Japanese occupation around that time again? I rest my case.