:jesus-christ: .
Tag places you've been to.
I got Sacramento, Tuscan, and New York. That's Kochi, Kuwana, and Tokyo.
The important thing to understand here is the sheer scale of destruction suffered by the peoples of Asia at the blood soaked hands of America.
we burned down every town in North Korea... we killed off twenty percent of the population"
- Airforce general Curtis Lemay
If I'm ever near the same state his grave resides in, I'm going to make it an objective to go out of my way to piss on his tombstone
39°00'55.1"N 104°51'17.8"W
Section 3, Row D, Grave 75
Colorado Springs
If we have any Colorado Hexbears, I expect you to give the good General your company, and help me keep his grave warm and moist until I - one day - arrive.
This happened - and a general admitted it, bragged even - and yet the mainstream narrative on hellworld decades later is that North Korea is the evil country
:doomjak:
I attended a talk by a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing and it was one of the toughest thing I’ve ever sat through. She gave everyone hugs at the end.
Does size mean area, population, or productive output/economic activity?
Either way it's so much destruction — hadn't realized the extent of the non-nuclear bombing the US did in Japan in WWII.
Which does really put into perspective the sheer scale of the factoid "the US dropped more bombs on Korea during the Korean War than they did in the entire pacific theater of WWII"
The historian Ward Wilson said that on the days of the atomic bombings, the Japanese High Command would wake up and hear news that some city is 90% destroyed, another city is 80% destroyed. So when they heard about the atomic bombings, it was a drop in the bucket because their country was already flattened by conventional means
Seems like it would be easier to list what still remained and make a comparison based on that. "America leveled, except for Loving County, TX, and a Cracker Barrel outside of former Wye, MT"
Nuclear bombing was actually a drop in the bucket in terms of destruction. It was something like 65th and 66th city down
well I'm guessing "percentage of the city destroyed" is probably a more concrete method of measurement than by population, since census data during the bombing campaigns would be hard to gather - considering the circumstances of the time period.
Oh I thought you were talking about the comparison between the cities (e.g. Tokyo = NYC) not the amount destroyed.
it would be bad opsec for me to tag all the ones of these i've been to, but let's just say that it's enough that it would break my brain to see all of these get cooked.
edit: fuck it actually. new york, chattanooga, chicago, nashville, augusta, duluth, evansville, ft wayne, knoxville, lexington, macon, battle creek, savannah, boston, tucson, wheeling, south bend, and madison. most of the midwest and south ones basically. 18 of these cities I have personally seen at least once.
I saw Toyama was mostly destroyed. Wiki said this:
The city was almost completely destroyed on the night of August 1–2, 1945. At the time of the bombing, the city was a center for aluminum, ball-bearing and special steel production. Left unscathed however, were the war-related factories just outside the city.
Yep. Whoops. Just happened to miss a military industrial target for a night on tour in town. Boy did we light the city up
Hey now, those factories probably belonged to major companies and the US government couldn't get their permission to target those; if they'd targeted them without permission, they would've had to pay reparations for damages incurred (which I found out later, apparently the US did in fact have to pay reparations to factories they'd destroyed in Europe (Germany?) during the war).
I lived in Miyakonojo for like a year, it's a rather small city and reminds me of the city I grew up in. Spent some time in Kagoshima and Miyazaki as well. I passed through Tokyo and Osaka. There's a criticism to have of Japan, but based on a bunch of people I talked to, including a woman to whom I was the first American she saw since the occupation, the war wasn't particularly popular and the living standard was horrid. There's a reason that there was a major communist movement after the Imperial government was overthrown, only to then have to realize that the Americans they thought were their friends and stood for democracy were also the enemy of the working class.
Add to this the crimes of the Japanese empire against the peoples of east Asia. I wonder why they called themselves the greatest generation. They filled the world with ghosts. The whole damn place is haunted now.
The whole damn place is haunted now.
Makes me wonder if the sheer destruction caused by the US (but not Japan for contextual reasons) is what leads to haunted village stories as you see in games like siren blood curse. I don't recall the story referencing WW2 but I wouldn't be surprised if the sheer death and destruction is what gave people the imagery for ghost towns where tons of people died rather than just left.
Nah I think it is mainly depopulation due to aging and the 90s boom leading people to abandon rural towns to live in the city. In the west at least there is usually some redevelopment but not in Japan. It is getting worse real ghost towns exist in Hokkaido for example.
And old people can't or wont leave, so they would die in the inaka, often alone.
No that has more to do with Japanese religion and rural depopulation I think.
Man, imagine if we could see ghosts. I'd be like going through a sea of pea soup, but ghosts.
Cover of Johnny Cash’s “I’ve been everywhere,” but it’s cities the US bombed.
How the fuck do you fit that many people on an island? Holy fuck
It's a big island spread through different climate zones that allow a wider diverse portfolio of food sources. Plus terrace farming helps a lot.
They also stole a lot of food from Korea at the time as well. I think they now import a lot of their food.
Oh I was thinking of their pre-imperial period. Yeah their opening up and westernization led to an increase in demand for food and resources and an increase of imports for them and later outright colonization for them as well.
Something worth bearing in mind is that Japan is nevertheless fully capable of sustaining its own population. In the 60s Japan got >90% of its calories from domestic production (and was a net exporter of rice) at about 95M population, today they get <40% of their calories domestically for about 125M population - so even though their population is higher, their production is less than half of what it was with 1960s technology, and a commitment to large-scale fully modernized agriculture across Japan could potentially turn it into a net exporter.
Yeah, the main roadblock in Japanese, (and Korean in a few years down the road) is that a lot of their agricultural production is coming from an increasingly elderly population that has had very little younger people joining to make it sustainable as the generations age out. This also ties into the heavy urbanization of their populations and the steady abandonment of the rural life in conjunction with declining birthrates and the average parenthood age growing due to a lack of financial stability which in turn is tied to the fact that Japan's economy has been stagnating as the effects of its switch from and industrial production economy to a consumption economy has finally started to be realized.
Really narrow streets. The average street in Japan is probably less than 20 ft wide. Here's a very normal street in a Yokohama suburb
The rest of the land is used for farming, sometimes interspersed with houses. When you get to the mountains, they are basically left untouched except for some small villages.
We really gonna have an argument over whether or not violence against the working class and violence against the bourgeois state are the :same-picture: or not?
German cities got fucked up pretty bad during the war too, but I never see anyone here blame anyone for that but the Nazis.
The Germans didn't get the "asiatic hordes" treatment where anything short of genocide is unacceptable
germany seems to have been bombed pretty consummately and had 4 million more homeless afterward. with almost equal prewar populations and generally (but varying) more german civilian deaths claimed as well. ~2+ mil vs . ~.8-1.2
The stats from the article says the following
The war had destroyed 4.8 million housing units. As a result, 13 million Germans were homeless. And there was 400 million cubic meters (14 billion cubic feet) of rubble to clear.
The degree of destruction varied regionally. In East Germany, 9.4 percent of pre-war housing was destroyed. In West Germany, the figure was 18.5 percent. At state level, the distinction is even starker: in Thuringia, only 3 percent of houses were destroyed. In North Rhine-Westphalia, it was close to 25 percent—and even more in the industrial heartland of the state.
Of the 54 largest cities (>100,000 inhabitants) in Germany, only four survived without significant damage: Lübeck, Wiesbaden, Halle and Erfurt. Worst hit was Würzburg (75 percent destroyed), followed by Dessau, Kassel, Mainz and Hamburg.
Over 70 percent of the largest cities had their urban core destroyed. Worst cases: Dresden, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Hanover, Nuremberg, Chemnitz.
Of the 151 medium-sized cities (25,000-100,000), about a third lost at least 20 percent of their housing stock. In Bavaria, Thuringia and Saxony, most medium-sized cities managed to make it through the war with little or no damage.
The German bombing campaign focused primarily on decapitation of the nazi german industrial capacity through indiscriminate bombings of industrial manufacturing centers with civilian targets being acceptable collateral damage.
In the Japanese bombing campaign, and every subsequent bombing Campaign in Asia, civilians centers were the targets of indiscriminate bombings alongside industrial manufacturing centers.
There is a clear racially-motivated difference of levels of mass slaughter perpetuated by the western powers during the war.
Side note: it's actually pretty interesting article you shared since it quietly pointed out that the Soviet side of the rush to Berlin was remarkably less destructive than the westerner side.
im not sure what's so revealing about these highlights unless you have the same data for japan and its worse.
being that 9 million japanese and 14 million germans were rendered homeless i would not make an assumption that the bombing of germany was any more 'discriminate' in its targetting of industrial areas over civilian ones.
According to official Army Air Forces statistics, in five months of incendiary attacks on Japan, the B–29s killed 310,000 Japanese, injured 412,000 others, and left 9.2 million people homeless. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s estimate of homeless Japanese was even higher: 15 million.
Daniel L. Haulman, “Firebombing Air Raids on Cities at Night, Air Power History, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 2018), 41.
Who in turn cites
Max Hastings, "Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945", New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. pp. 317-318.
Which as I'm sure you can guess I don't have in my hands right now so you'll have to forgive me for being unable to directly dig through that books citation to another book's citation all the way to the primary source.
Here's another source from the British Imperial war museum that corroborates similar numbers
And some more corroborating numbers here from a random Tampa Bay article examining the genocidal firebombings of Japan under the section titled "fighting to be remembered" cw: discriptions of crimes and human suffering.
another government department disputing the figure is pretty significant. and would give more water for an exceptional treatment of japan.
i still'd like more robust figures but we're not exactly writing dissertations. also and especially for the german numbers, if their homeless got padded by population expulsions, what territory "germany" constitutes etc.
I believe I saw a source saying that roughly 12 million Germans east of Germany - so a mix of recent German settlers, German descendants from migrations from centuries back, and Germans from the provinces that were returned to the Polish SSR most likely - fled westwards with a majority (like 8-9 mil) of them settling in western germany, and the minority split between east germany and emigration to the Americas.
Also Germany, even without it's nazi period provinces that were returned to other nations, is still more than twice the size of Japan if we're talking raw square kilometers of landmass which makes it understandable that Germany had such high numbers as it did yet that comparison bares the psychopathy of the american military during the pacific campaign in the fact that even though Japan is less than the size of Germany, it's civilian population had suffered similar numbers of casualties.
that Germany had such high numbers as it did
total area should not have a bearing on homeless people or civilian casualties; most operative being urbanization and general population... which are in fact terribly difficult to research. urbanization stats reliably start in 1960 but for what its worth "germany" (is that both halves? :shrug-outta-hecks:) was more urban than japan at that time: 71% v 63% accordin to the world bank
and only a proportion of german deportees ought to have been included in post-war stats on homelessness, if at all. transfers continued after the peace and ive got no idea the share between that & fleeing with the nazi army
im not going to go further into the reeds on this so i'll just finish with a clarification of what my position has been. i am:
a) uncertain about claims japan got the worse of bombing campaigns. before looking into it today i'd have off-handedly agreed with that assertion but i got curious, and publicly available easy information is not conclusive enough imo for a final word. but thats fairly immaterial because
b) "strategic bombing" as the Wallies called it, (and as has been euphemistically used more recently as well) is just war crimes. in the 40s they didn't have the technology to be able to avoid 'civilian targets' but they also more-or-less didn't care. in europe the british were not shy about the fact they were bombing german civilian targets as revenge for the early war. doctrinal statements both in militaries & propaganda aren't all that secretive about the "morale" effect expected on target populations after very strategically blowing up a town that also happens to have a factory & a rail line.
so my dispute is basically how did or could that have changed in a significant way from germany to japan. without extremely damning evidence (and what you've provided can firmly suggest parity, which was also my initial feel) i don't think its necessary to portray it as genocidal or necessarily as worse than what had been done to germany. Wallies to NATO, civilians dying are just an acceptable consequence of being able to bomb the enemy when they can't do it back.
and im not even saying the US wasn't racist in ww2 they were extremely racist but its important to put that context where its really exists i.e. domestic policy, propaganda, conduct of ground forces instead of trying to do a narrative of genocide when the US was far too lenient on japanese leadership & far too quick to turn them into anticommunist allies for that to have been an overriding or primary motivation
Sorry, what the devil is a "wallies"? Is that commonwealth slang?
Western-allies for times the anglos and cronies did things different from/against the USSR
I thought it was some sort of Australian insult to be honest. It's actually quite a convenient word now that I think of it.
Anyways, in relation to
total area should not have a bearing on homeless people or civilian casualties; most operative being urbanization and general population
I wanted to clarify that an influx of, essentially German refugees, into Germany from both their failed settler project of "Lebensraum" and of the partitioning of Eastern Germany to Poland along the Oder–Neisse line and the expulsion of the majority of Germans in the newly reclaimed Polish lands after the war, which is a - chaotic - redistribution of the general population across both Germanies.
more like dunking on fascist amerikkka putting imperialist japan "in its place" with an inhuman firebombing campaign. i can hate the us and japan and also what the former did to the latter. i got room.
It *is * possible to hate a country for the imperialistic actions of its government while also condemning violent attacks on its people by a foreign power.
Is there a comparison in this data for other countries subjected to strategic bombing? Wondering how this compares to Germany or even outside of WW2
