: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.
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 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.
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.
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