That still does not justify obliterating a hundred thousand innocent lives in the blink of an eye.

Deaths due to ware are unfortunate without a doubt. Unfortunately it will always happen to the end of humanity because humans, in a very real way, are unable to learn from their past. As far as the justification, are you honestly saying that it would have been better to never have dropped the bombs and face the reality that the war would have gone on for at least another year or so and would have incurred many times more than 100,000 deaths? Are you honestly saying the prolonged death count is somehow more justifiable?

Statement about 'another year' of war is not correct. Japan loosed the war already and using nuclear weapons was purely political act to demonstrate the 'super power of US'. (meaning of war researchers of not US origin)

Those bombs were dropped because they wanted to test them on real people…

Unless they were actively working as resistance, they weren’t innocent.

Weird way of thinking

Would you have preferred the invasion of mainland Japan?

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By ending the war , it saved millions more from the Japanese atrocities.

So you are not a bastard if there's a bigger bastard than you? I don't think so.

The problem is that for some crimes/genocide of innocents civilians there is a lot of noise, while for other similar crimes, nobody is judged and nobody is outraged. The finger is pointed most of the time in one direction only.

Isabella And that direction is humans…only humans cause these atrocities.

Read about United States crimes against humanity...

This is not about Japan tho

We are aware of those. That does not justify killing thousands of lives in return. Rather, more Japanese war criminals should have been charged.

Killing people is what happens in war.

Depends on whom you kill. According to the official "rules" you're meant to go for enemy soldiers and war related industry, not civilians.

Well... seeing as that Japan had already killed 10 million civilians during 1939 to 1944 Dropping the bombs saved millions of lives Collateral damage

That is my point exactly. It was literally only thing that stopped them from killing more.

Hiroshima had an army base and was a port where soldiers came and went.

Hiroshima was a base for the Japanese military.

There was both an army base and a military port in Hiroshima.

There's a vast difference. At the time the bombs were dropped Germany had already lost. The war was actually in the process of shifting the front over to Japan. Which is actually the worst? Drop a couple of bombs and thereby killing 100,000 or so...or...continuing a war that would have cost many more lives?

Exactly, I think that’s most likely the cause for the difference in reactions.

That’s less true than it used to be.

The Japanese likely were beaten at that point and there's no way they could have won the war. But also the Japanese would have continued fighting against any attack against their homeland and many thousands would have died (on both sides), including civilians. Even if you believe, like many do, that it was the Soviet threat that shocked Japan into surrendering and they used the bomb as a convenient excuse, the fact remains that the bomb gave them the excuse they needed.

The Reds had promised to pin down the Japs in Manchuria, They had no ability to perform an amphibious landing of any kine with any amount of force. The yanks were well trained and bloodied all through the island hopping campaign. They were going to do the landing on Japan. Japan had conscripted 28 million civilians to attach the American forces. The children were being trained to run under tanks with bombs to kamikaze themselves. they had over 10,000 clay pot bombs hidden in underground shelters to be distributed to the children once the Americans landed ashore. Hover estimated 2-4 million American casualties about 60 days before the bomb. Navel and Marine brass estimated 1 million. About two weeks before the first bomb, right after the successful test, Truman had a famous scientist investigate and he estimated 1.7 to 4 million casualties with a minimum of 500,000 to 800,000 dead. We were talking about Millions of dead just on the allied side.

The damage to the Japanese would have been catastrophic. Every male from 15-60 and every female from 17-40 were being trained as militia troop with mostly sharpened bamboo sticks but also with anything available from muzzle loading weapons to bows to pitchforks. Their manual stressed the importance of kamikaze tactics. No one really thought they would surrender, ever. The bomb was thought to simply provide a quicker and faster way to bombing runs to limit Allied casualties once they hit the beaches.

Naturally.

You guys are killing me. We need to understand the actual history and not interject our modern day views onto the past. The Japanese were absolute monsters to the innocent and were fanatical and did not surrender. They were training their women and children to fight the Americans when they landed. It would have meant the utter destruction of their military and their civilians. We surrounded them and asked for surrender, they refused. We firebombed Tokyo and burned an estimated 100,000 people to death and asked for their surrender. They refused. Every major city was firebombed to an estimated 63% effectiveness. No surrender. The Americans dropped the first nuke and asked for their surrender and they didn't respond. The second nuke was dropped and they flew every bomber they could put into the air over them, about 1000 bombers, as if to say that we could keep this up forever. They finally surrendered. That surrender really did save their way of life.

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I still don't understand why they bombed not one but two cities. One demonstration should've been enough.

Because the Japanese refused to unconditionally surrender. They were asked. They were warned.

I correct myself: One city was WAY more than enough. I did not mean they should have bombed a city AT ALL. But they did and in spite of the horrors the bomb did, they dropped another. That's what I meant. Sorry if I sounded cold-hearted.

Germany had already surrendered.

I'm sorry, David Herz, but you do not have the full story to draw your conclusions from. We can see the horrors of the camps, we can see the horrors of the bomb. But we start to lose our sympathy meter when we don't have pictures burned into our memories. The Japanese performed horrendous atrocities and would have continued to do so. If you surrendered you were less then nothing and were relentlessly tortured, in their eyes you were not human. They had conscripted practically their entire population to fight and die with sharp bamboo poles. It was once mentioned that there are no civilians left in Japan. Everyone was radicalized to fight to the death. They even conscripted their children to die. You should also look up bamboo torture, it was supposedly common on the islands. The bomb, horrible as it is, saved their civilians from utter destruction. they were All going to suicide against the allies if they could not win outright.

You were told wrong.

From all sides. One side was trying to enslave the world. To accomplish this they raped, tortured and conducted bizarre experiments on civilians, and attacked peaceful nations. The other side stopped them—and didn’t run concentration camps or brutalize entire populations (Nanking, cough). So really—stop with the false moral equivalency.

Amen

It was war. In war you kill people, break things and try to make the other side surrender. And let’s be clear: the US didn’t start it. We didn’t uproot pearl and float it to the home island; they came to the US.

Strangely no, they didn't. The US were kind enough to contribute quite a lot of soldiers, but as far as I know all the battles were fought abroad. No raiding of farms in Iowa, no Texan cattle confiscated by the enemy, no plundering of shops in Podunk/Missouri, no raping of mothers and daughters left behind by husbands, fathers and brothers, no fathers coming home from the horrors to find their houses burned down. That perspective is quite different from the one that participants from France, Japan, Great Britain, Germany and all their colonies share.

Where did you get your history lessons from????

I dont know if I could be as generous as your grandfather had I been on the railway. Or their POW camps. A truly gracious and forgiving person. You are so blessed to have him as your grandfather.

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My made up grandfather says your made up grandfather was a colossal sissy.

It. Was. War. People die in war.

None of those countries could do that since they didn’t have the means or the technology to do so (at the time).

I would think that you will want to raise the issue of bombing said innocent people. There was no way to cripple an enemy war machine except by large bombs and lots of them. Everyone did it. Germany did it but they also ended up targeting civilians during the blitz. They stopped targeting air bases and purposely started on innocent civilians with no military targets involved. Even Dresden was listed with bomber command as having over 100 factories - a precision optics factory, uboat parts, Radio parts and a hub of railways for troops being shipped to the front. Germany and Japan sanctioned and murdered innocent people including babies and children on a massive, horrifying scale.

I’m fairly sure we only hate you

@Rob Woodman: 🤔🤔🤔😂

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You mean the world hates you. Stop exaggerating.

War isn’t crimes. Crimes can be committed during war, but the point of war is killing enough people and breaking enough stuff (or demonstrating you can) to make the other side quit.

Rob even crimes against humanity are that, crimes. If you don't understand language, then stforku.

You do understand there are actually rules for war, and just because you want to wring your hands and proclaim something a crime—doesn’t make it a crime—in war time. Facts over feelings. Sorry.

Retaliation against mostly innocent victims. This was not an attack on a vast military complex which ended up killing innocents as collateral damage. It was the shameful targeting of two cities for no other reason than a display of might, and it's a shameful war crime that will forever blight my country. I feel nothing but disgust for anyone trying to justify the unjustifiable.

War always gets innocent people killed... unless you live in the US or some other lucky place. Armies march over towns and cities in their advance and even if the town capitulates they rape, torture, maim and kill anyone they want. If I remember right, in WWI and WWII Polish armies always left rows of hanged men and piles or corpses of mutilated raped women and children... the Russians weren't better either. Oddly enough the German armies were the less sadistic of the bunch. You can easily find pictures of the horrors armies left behind...if you have the stomach for it.

And I feel deep sadness over your ignorance.

You're absolutely right! Also, the people who were responsible for those bombs were sadistic criminals in my opinion. The research results they so gladly collected, the survivors they inspected and not helped?... Of course, the great USA can do anything and never have to answer for it. Money rules the world, after all. But if someone attacks them, not that I excuse any of it and let that be very clear, then they have the freedom to annihilate entire populations. Often without solving anything or ever catching the guilty party. If you follow that train of thought, then the USA, China or Russia could also be nuked for their atrocities, but they continue to do what they want without consequence and dictate what everyone else can think. I don't see a trial in The Hague concerning the genocide against the Native Americans, the Slaves or the Uighurs or Tatars, the minorities in the gulags in Russia or the innocent Japanese in work camps in the USA commencing soon... And if you get downvoted for stating this, it tells you enough about people's mentality. It's just so sad.

Japanese weren’t put in work camps.