Poll: Was It Wrong To Drop The Atomic Bombs In Japan?

[Starke]

Yes, as far as I know it was purely aimed at killing as many civilians as possible, and that its effects are still messing up unborn babies to this day? Though I barely know anything about the battles in the East during WW2, I have only studied the major battles relating directly to Germany and Italy.

Well then. Let's start your education with the Japanese treatment of POWs. While Germany abided, mostly by the rules of warfare when it came to enemy combatants, the Japanese looked at surrendering soldiers as less than human. They would ship them back to the main islands so that medical students could vivisect them for practice. IF THEY WERE LUCKY. If they weren't the medical experimentation they suffered was similar to that inflicted on the civilian population.

Like the military PoWs, the Japanese viewed the civilian population as less than human. They would routinely pass them on for "medical" experimentation, that included vivisecting mothers on a bet to see what the gender of the fetus was. They confiscated women and forced them into prostitution, at gunpoint, literally. And this is before we even get into the use of actual torture in an effort to obtain intelligence.

And all of this came out at a death toll of around 20 million in China alone. (I can fact check the number again, but if it's wrong it isn't far off the mark.)

EDIT: In contrast the Germans continued their campaign of hunting Jews and "undesirables", but, as I mentioned above, their methods of execution were positively humane by comparison.

I say Japan should drop a couple of nukes in a couple of good old American cities: All is fair and everyone would be happy. ^_^

I say that if population of the islands had been exterminated, the balance of dead civilians still would have been on the Japanese.

 

[Starke]

The fire bombing of Dresden killed more people, I think.

Possibly. The firebombing of Dresden destroyed more culturally significant material however. A member of the German Nobility had collected a ridiculous amount of art in Dresden sometime in the eighteenth century (I think) that, to my knowledge, was destroyed in the attack.

 

[mrpenguinismyhomeboy]

The fire bombing of Dresden killed more people, I think.

Possibly. The firebombing of Dresden destroyed more culturally significant material however. A member of the German Nobility had collected a ridiculous amount of art in Dresden sometime in the eighteenth century (I think) that, to my knowledge, was destroyed in the attack.

I don't know much really, but I thought slaughterhouse five was a great book.

 

[wargrafix]

no it did not. it was like saying 9/11 HAD to happen. Neither HAD to occur. It was a matter of choice. Both event shows how unreasonable people can be.

It does show how unreasonable people can be, but some actions create consequences. Japan's brutality and extreme determination forced an act that many consider to be inhumane. So yes it showed how unreasonable both the Germans and Japanese were when they tried to take over the world for their own gains.

Just like the American run internment camps and the concentration camps where american japanese ppl were held?

 

[nightwolf667]

Okay, radiation sickness. It keeps getting brought up. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine is to this day the most radioactive site on this planet that causes significant health problems in those affected. According to study by BBC and on the subject of future generations: "Scientists studying victims of the Chernobyl disaster have discovered that radiation-induced genetic mutations can be passed down from generation to generation.

Genetic mutations appear to occur twice as often in the children of families exposed to radioactive fallout and represent permanent damage to the DNA that is passed down through the generations.

The effect was not observed in the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/medical_notes/461921.stm

The first two atom bombs contained a smaller amount of radiation than later versions, therefore long lasting effects are minimal.

no it did not. it was like saying 9/11 HAD to happen. Neither HAD to occur. It was a matter of choice. Both event shows how unreasonable people can be.

It does show how unreasonable people can be, but some actions create consequences. Japan's brutality and extreme determination forced an act that many consider to be inhumane. So yes it showed how unreasonable both the Germans and Japanese were when they tried to take over the world for their own gains.

Just like the American run internment camps and the concentration camps where american japanese ppl were held?

Please do not compare the American internment camps (while a violation of civil rights and generally awful) with the German and Japanese concentration camps. The German ones were dedicated to the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables such as gays, gypsies, and political prisoners. 6 million people died in them. The same can be said of the Japanese and their treatment of both POWs and the civilians they captured. Often those civilians and POWs were shipped off to camps like Unit 731 where they were subject to all kinds of medical experiments. Go look it up.

The Americans never tried to exterminate the Japanese American citizens they held in the camps. The Japanese and the Nazis both attempted genocide. The Nazis on the Jews and the Japanese on everyone who was not Japanese.

 

[Starke]

The fire bombing of Dresden killed more people, I think.

Possibly. The firebombing of Dresden destroyed more culturally significant material however. A member of the German Nobility had collected a ridiculous amount of art in Dresden sometime in the eighteenth century (I think) that, to my knowledge, was destroyed in the attack.

I don't know much really, but I thought slaughterhouse five was a great book.

Translating loosly from my German textbook:

Dresden was noted for the beuty of its churches, streets and musieums. The initial concentration was collected by August der Starke[footnote]"der Starke" translates to "the Strong", but given it's part of a proper noun... I elected not to translate it... plus there's the association factor... [/footnote] (1670-1733). He encouraged a kind of cultural renesance in the city. Causing it to be known for it's artists and architects. The city gained the nickname "The Florence on the Elb (river)".

EDIT: My text estimates the death toll in the Dresden bombings between 35k and 100k.

Just like the American run internment camps and the concentration camps where american japanese ppl were held?

Bonus points for remembering that the internment camps existed. Unfortunatly an F for equating a system which included a day pass system with Genocide. Its like mixing up Hotel Rowanda with a Care Bears movie. Just don't do it. You'll look like an idiot.

 

[Brandon237]

i think one is justifiable.
sure, my history knowledge suxorz, but i don't see why they had to drop two.

You have to remember that this bomb was the first of its kind. No one had this much destructive power, and because of this it was a matter of calling bluffs. Since there had never been a bomb like this before it would be easy for the Japanese to think that there was only one. In their minds, something that powerful must have taken a lot of time and resources to create, and it isn't likely that that amount of effort would be put into creating another one, or they lacked the resources to build another one. Which means they would think that we were bluffing about the second one. Once we dropped it though, they realized that we did indeed have more of these bombs and that we weren't bluffing.

If they had just surrendered then we would have only dropped one, but they tried to call our bluff so we had to bring out our pocket aces. I think this quote sums it up nicely:

I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

Japan just felt lucky that day.

Ironically enough, had the Japanese "felt lucky" twice, they would have been okay since America had only made 3 at the time, the test one, Hiroshima and the Nagasaki one. Japan were right in thinking that America didn't have many, they just kinda, misjudged, by a single bomb.

 

[Miew]

The German ones were dedicated to the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables such as gays, gypsies, and political prisoners. 6 million people died in them.

6 Million? Where did you get that number? Over the course of 6 years that would mean more than 2000 deaths per day on average. That seems pretty unlikely.

 

[nightwolf667]

The German ones were dedicated to the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables such as gays, gypsies, and political prisoners. 6 million people died in them.

6 Million? Where did you get that number? Over the course of 6 years that would mean more than 2000 deaths per day on average. That seems pretty unlikely.

My apologies, 3.5 million were murdered in the death camps. 6 million is the average of all Jews who died during the war, including those in the Ghettos who never made it to the camps and those who died in the uprisings like the one in Warsaw.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/history.html

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/holocaust.htm

EDIT: you have to realize that this was systematic. It was organized and controlled with a purpose designed specifically for the eradication of all Jews everywhere. At camps like Auschwitz they immediately sent all those children below the ages of eighteen and those above the age of 40 (I think, it might have been lower) to the gas chambers. They also sent the sick and the disabled. That's only the camps and doesn't cover the ghettos or the Nazis soldiers who shot Jews in the streets for fun.

I got curious and went to Wikipedia to look at the total of deaths comparably in the Pacific Theater and estimated Japanese War Crimes (usually I don't cite Wiki, but in this case it's useful):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Let's start with the estimated Japanese casualties:
Total Population 1939: 71,380,000
Military deaths: 2,120,000
Civilian deaths: 580,000
Total: 2,700,000
Percent of 1939 population: 3.78%

Now:
Estimated Japanese War Crimes by R. J Rummel: 5,424,000.
Detailed by country: China 3,695,000
Indochina 457,000
Korea 378,000
Indonesia 375,000
Malaya-Singapore 283,000
Philippines 119,000
Burma 60,000
Pacific Islands 57,000

That's a lot of civilians right? Well that's the conservative estimate.

According to Werner Gruhl
Japanese war crimes: 20,365,000.
Detailed by country:
China 12,392,000 (China is estimated to have lost between 7,000,000 civilians and 16,000,000)
Indochina 1,500,000
Korea 500,000
Dutch East Indies 3,000,000
Malaya and Singapore 100,000
Philippines 500,000
Burma 170,000
Forced laborers in Southeast Asia 70,000, 30,000 interned non-Asian civilians; Timor 60,000; Thailand and Pacific Islands 60,000

Now POWs

Werner Gruhl estimates POW deaths in Japanese captivity at 331,584
Detailed by country:
China 270,000
Netherlands 8,500
U.K. 12,433
Canada 273
Philippines 20,000
Australia 7,412
New Zealand 31
the United States 12,935

Like Starke said above: The Japanese make the Nazis look like humane boy scouts. If you want total civilian casualties on the Western front go to the wiki sight and look. Russia also did some very terrible things to POWs. WWII like it's predecessor is one of the most bloody wars in human history. Remember: most of the Japanese war crimes went unpunished.

 

[FlameUnquenchable]

no it did not. it was like saying 9/11 HAD to happen. Neither HAD to occur. It was a matter of choice. Both event shows how unreasonable people can be.

It does show how unreasonable people can be, but some actions create consequences. Japan's brutality and extreme determination forced an act that many consider to be inhumane. So yes it showed how unreasonable both the Germans and Japanese were when they tried to take over the world for their own gains.

Just like the American run internment camps and the concentration camps where american japanese ppl were held?

Sigh...I'm glad others responded to this to save me the hassle of explaining it. I actually can't believe you made that comparison, seemingly with the sincere belief that it was an equal basis of contrast...

 

[angelrubio]

Sure...

 

[nipsen]

..not really inconceivable that Japan would have surrendered without the atomic bombings of.. two militarily insignificant targets..

Not really inconceivable that the US was right as well - that the bombings created an excuse that made the surrender easier.

Btw - on internment camps and concentration camps. .. in most of the cases, there were no differences between them, you know. People of unfortunate ethnic, political and national origin goes in on one end. Leave their belongings at the door. And a mass of prisoners put in jail with no process to speak of are left. The British invented it. And the US is the last country to still keep the tradition alive. Along with China.

Anyway..

 

[Starke]

..not really inconceivable that Japan would have surrendered without the atomic bombings of.. two militarily insignificant targets..

According to people who know what the fuck they're talking about? Yes, yes it is.

Japan had already been losing to the United States badly, for basically four years. They had refused any prior requests for their surrender. They get nuked, and the surrender happens. That is what we call non-spurious "cause and effect."

Not really inconceivable that the US was right as well - that the bombings created an excuse that made the surrender easier.

Btw - on internment camps and concentration camps. .. in most of the cases, there were no differences between them, you know. People of unfortunate ethnic, political and national origin goes in on one end. Leave their belongings at the door. And a mass of prisoners put in jail with no process to speak of are left. The British invented it. And the US is the last country to still keep the tradition alive. Along with China.

Anyway..

My god, are you really that dense?

Okay, on one hand we have an internment camp system, where the people are fed, housed (marginally), and allowed out on a day pass system. On the other hand we have a system that was about systematically torturing people to death and you can't tell the difference?

That's like saying there's no difference between you being arrested by the police for punching a guy in the gut and spending thirty days in jail and your sister being kidnapped, raped and murdered.

EDIT: Okay, I see what you did there. By your model what the Japanese did doesn't qualify as an internment camp system, and neither do the camps in Germany.

In the future, please try to avoid making generalities like the ones you did, in a focused argument. It actually serves to undermine your own argument. While most camps may follow your model, the ones that the Japanese set up in World War II certainly do not.

I apologize for my reply, but your post defied logic, common sense, and my bile duct.

Yes, as far as I know it was purely aimed at killing as many civilians as possible, and that its effects are still messing up unborn babies to this day? Though I barely know anything about the battles in the East during WW2, I have only studied the major battles relating directly to Germany and Italy.

Well then. Let's start your education with the Japanese treatment of POWs. While Germany abided, mostly by the rules of warfare when it came to enemy combatants, the Japanese looked at surrendering soldiers as less than human. They would ship them back to the main islands so that medical students could vivisect them for practice. IF THEY WERE LUCKY. If they weren't the medical experimentation they suffered was similar to that inflicted on the civilian population.

Like the military PoWs, the Japanese viewed the civilian population as less than human. They would routinely pass them on for "medical" experimentation, that included vivisecting mothers on a bet to see what the gender of the fetus was. They confiscated women and forced them into prostitution, at gunpoint, literally. And this is before we even get into the use of actual torture in an effort to obtain intelligence.

And all of this came out at a death toll of around 20 million in China alone. (I can fact check the number again, but if it's wrong it isn't far off the mark.)

EDIT: In contrast the Germans continued their campaign of hunting Jews and "undesirables", but, as I mentioned above, their methods of execution were positively humane by comparison.

If there was a terrorist attack (with lets say 100 dead) in NY because of this :

<youtube=cUxx1qgWGQ4>

Would you find that terrorist attack justified?
Because I would not. But then again, I can't find any justification in nuking Japan either.
Were all of these Japanese war crimes you site known to the US army & administration on August 1945? Is that why the US nuked Japan? To punish the Japanese for their war crimes?

I'm sorry, you fail comparative politics. The United States isn't involved in a campaign to exterminate every other ethnicity on the goddamn planet. The Japanese were. The United States did not issue orders to arm its population with sticks and resist to the last. The Japanese did.

EDIT: If you wanted to make a strong comparative argument between Imperial Japan, and the United States the cases you need to examine are Vietnam and Iraq, Afghanistan just will not cut it. Trust me on this.

The nukes weren't punishment, they were merciful. Seriously. When choosing between having to go house by house and kill off every person on the main islands or nuke them to prove that any sacrifice they made would be completely in vain? Prove to them that we could annihilate them without offering them the "honor" of dying in battle? Nuking was the humane option. The only place where this is disputed is in revisionist history.

As for the extent of their war-crimes? We don't know that today. They are fucking legion. The US military knew about the crimes in general, and had a general idea of the extent of them. We collected Unit 731's research data from the Japanese and turned them loose. We collected their fucking data. And turned these monsters loose. Honestly, Unit 731 is a convincing argument to turn the main islands into a full on genocide.

 

[Starke]

i think one is justifiable.
sure, my history knowledge suxorz, but i don't see why they had to drop two.

You have to remember that this bomb was the first of its kind. No one had this much destructive power, and because of this it was a matter of calling bluffs. Since there had never been a bomb like this before it would be easy for the Japanese to think that there was only one. In their minds, something that powerful must have taken a lot of time and resources to create, and it isn't likely that that amount of effort would be put into creating another one, or they lacked the resources to build another one. Which means they would think that we were bluffing about the second one. Once we dropped it though, they realized that we did indeed have more of these bombs and that we weren't bluffing.

If they had just surrendered then we would have only dropped one, but they tried to call our bluff so we had to bring out our pocket aces. I think this quote sums it up nicely:

I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

Japan just felt lucky that day.

Ironically enough, had the Japanese "felt lucky" twice, they would have been okay since America had only made 3 at the time, the test one, Hiroshima and the Nagasaki one. Japan were right in thinking that America didn't have many, they just kinda, misjudged, by a single bomb.

A third device was in production and would have been ready for deployment by August.

The general wisdom is this, the Japanese didn't know about the testing, due to secrecy and the difficulties associated with Japanese attempts at infiltrating the West Coast. The second bomb proved that we could do it again if needed, and that this wasn't some unique prototype we couldn't replicate.