They dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to make the Soviet Union's invasion of Hokkaido unnecessary and as a performative act to horrify the world in to subjugation.
The whole 'saved more lives than it cost' is a bad argument unless the plan was to slaughter a hundred thousand civilians on landing. Note the Nazi invasion of France cost 60,000 lives in civilian resistance...this was at the beginning of the war.
Japan would have surrendered on the first day of invasion.
The day I realized america was basically a fascist country was in a college philosophy class on ethics, we had a debate about the bombs and I was one of maybe 3 people in a class of 30 or so who thought vaporizing a quarter million civilians was actually not a good thing.
I think I was the one presenting and I had laid out all the obvious shit about this: every commission afterwards concluded that a full scale land invasion was not necessary, that Japan literally didn't have the bullets to continue fighting a land war at home, that Japan had been reaching out about a ceasefire, that even the most bloodthirsty generals thought it was completely excessive and unnecessary. And still none of these dipshits had a single counterpoint but still thought it was okay, because I guess ethics classes in the philosophy dept doesn't stand a chance against ideology.
In 9th grade, I said I didn’t support the bombs and a guy to me said, “Well of course a girl wouldn’t support it.” Also the same class where my teacher tried to insinuate 1 year old me somehow helped do 9/11.
Literally just that I was probably the only Muslim student that has ever been to that small white high school lol. He basically thought most Muslims were ‘in on it’ or ‘supported it’. If I remember right, his one sentence was: You know, if you were an adult then, you probably would have been happy about it.
Well... it’s good to know that kids have always been taught only by the most educated amongst us :/
If the Soviet Union landed in Japan, the emperor and nobles would be executed
It's disgusting to keep the status of war
criminalcriminalsif they were guaranteed to be able to keep the emperor. Which we allowed anyway.
All of the major Allies, including the USSR and China, agreed in the Potsdam Declaration that they would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from Japan. Keeping the Emperor was a condition and therefore unacceptable from the get-go.
This isn't just pointless legalism either. The prevailing theory at the time (and still pretty common theory now) is that the end of WWI via a conditional surrender enabled the Nazis to twist what was pretty much a complete defeat into the "Stab in the back" myth.
The WWII Allies agreed on only accepting unconditional surrender from the Axis so that there could be no argument down the line that the Nazis or Imperial Japan could have won the war if they had held on juuuuust a little longer and hadn't been betrayed by [insert scapegoat here].
this is a very Lib level excuse for an atrocity
Well yeah, that's why unconditional surrender as a war goal was promoted and accepted since 1943 by noted lib...
Checks notes
...Joseph Stalin.
force a surrender with identical terms has any merit.
That's the whole point. There were no terms to the surrender, it was unconditional.
Besides, it's a complete misrepresentation to claim that the Japanese only wanted to keep their Emperor. As late as June 1945 the Japanese leadership wrote memoranda to each other and the Emperor stating that they wanted to keep fighting until a "decisive battle" could induce the Allies to settle on more favorable terms. They also wanted to keep some of their colonies, oversee their own demilitarization (lol), and prosecute their own war criminals (LMAO).
The Emperor did direct some of his diplomats to put out peace feelers to some small neutral countries, who basically told Japan to take the deal or leave it. The Japanese also reached out to the USSR, which also told them to surrender unconditionally or fuck off.
If the Japanese military was truly willing to surrender, it would have done so when all peace feelers under the current conditions were exhausted.
The idea that Japan was ready to surrender but for the preservation of the monarchy is completely a-historical.
Well I've seen the light.
Agreeing with Stalin makes me a lib, whereas agreeing with American military leaders makes you a leftist.
I’m pretty sure Stalin’s opinion on Japan’s surrender two years before the fact is pretty fucking irrelevant here
Stalin adopted unconditional surrender as the goal of the war from the Casablanca conference in 1943 and restated it as a specific war goal against Japan in the Potsdam Declaration in July 1945. Unless you're laboring under the assumption that Japan surrendered in 1947, Stalin's position on unconditional surrender is pretty fucking clear.
Sorry your broken Lib brain is incapable of understanding that we literally gave them that condition
Oh cool, just let the right wing Imperialists have a conditional surrender so they can twist it into a myth of national betryal. That'll never come back to fuck up the world, except for that time it did.
Fascists get the bullet. Not concessions. McAurthur fucked up after the fact by letting the Japanese keep the monarchy. That does not change the fact that negotiating with Fascists is absolutely lib shit.
P.s. when American military leaders say things that run counter to the popular pro American imperialist narrative (that we “had to” drop the bombs to “save lives”) you should probably fucking pay attention, you absolute moron,
Except dropping the bombs saved lives. Chinese lives, Korean lives, Vietnamese lives, and countless others. But hey, I guess my people should have just sucked it up for a few more months of being murdered by the fascists while waiting for America to muster up an invasion fleet.
Always good to break out this piece when shitlibs claim the "bombing saved lives"
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/
Also that the Japanese military advised against war with the USSR due to their defeat at Khalkhin Gol, as well as the Red Army literally steamrolling through the Japanese army in Manchuria in two weeks kinda says something about the matchup between the two.
Everyone really needs to keep in mind that the eastern front generals wanted to go to war with the ussr the minute they got Germany on lock down
most milhis nerds would probably say that the rkka had no capability of invading japan, so ACKSHUALLY the nukes made us surrender. this ignores of course their amphibious operations in the baltic and the ijn being the equivalent of a battleship and about 200 other artifical reefs around the pacific
The idea that japan never would have surrendered, that the japanese people were brainwashed into fighting till the very end is very… western.
I like Dan Carlin's podcasts, but his most recent Hardcore History series focuses on just this very thing. Between that and his constant political "both-siderism", I'm probably going to stop listening to him.
Carlin is an absolute coward hack who hides behind the flimsy excuse of "I'm not a historian".
america intercepted a transmission to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow asking for him to mediate their surrender
would you happen to have a link to this? I'd like to read more
On the other hand, even when the Emperor recorded his surrender announcement, elements of the Imperial military basically stormed the Imperial Palace to stop it from being broadcast. The discs had to be smuggled out of the Palace grounds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
So yeah, Japan was not a monolith and not everyone was on board with fighting to the last ditch, but elements of the military certainly were and in 1945 they were effectively running the show.
The Japanese aren't a monolith, and that's one of the most irritating things trying to read about the Pacific campaign. It intrigues me as far as WW2 goes because the European campaign (in the west of Europe anyway) gets all the spotlight, with the Pacific campaign - especially the not-US contributions to it - gets a lot less attention. But unfortunately most of the writers are warhawks from the West who write about Japan as if it's this monolithic entity, as if every single person had the exact same BuShIdO sPiRiT and how the US couldn't invade because swarms of schoolchildren would attack them with grenades and sticks or something.
Meanwhile the Japanese are actual human beings and while bushido spirit type shit was taught to the officers and soldiers I highly doubt the claim that every single Japanese person was a secret ninja samurai ready to die for their country.
My Asian history professor was Japanese and he told us that his grandfather was arrested and thrown in prison for opposing the war and the emperor system. So yea, the idea that the Japanese were some sort of brainwashed horde that would fight to the death for their government is just racist, orientalist horseshit, there was opposition to the war and to Japanese imperialism within Japan.
From diary accounts and military strategy this is true, actually. (Warning, long read). From accounts, the heads of military strategy barely responded to the nuclear bombs, Japan had already been hit hard by firebombing runs and this was loosely par for the course. They were hoping for Soviet neutrality, (or better yet- get the Soviets to fight with them against the US/UK) and the invasion of Manchuria took the wind out of their sails, so to speak.
I'm not sure how Howard Zinn frames the argument so maybe I'm totally wrong. The top brass definitely wanted to keep fighting though, and as seen with the Hokkaido invasion, (which happened after the Japanese had already surrendered) some military forces kept fighting defensively after stand down orders came in.
The nukes were definitely a posturing move by the US though, no argument there, I've always felt it was more about scaring the Soviets than forcing surrender
This is accurate, to my knowledge. The firebombing killed more people than the nuclear bombs did, even.
The emperor and military were pretty far removed on whether to surrender. I don't have the sources on hand, but I believe the military was planning a coup before the emperor announced the surrender on national radio. The American projections on Japanese civilians fighting to the death or whatever was clearly wrong, but the military forcing the fight to continue until the capital was captured, same as Germany, is not that farfetched.Hokkaido invasion? Can't find anything about it.
Do you mean Kuril islands? That went on a bit after the end of the war.
unless the plan was to slaughter a hundred thousand civilians on landing
😬tbh it kinda was
Yeah, for real, people should read up on what an invasion would have involved.
Literal school children were being armed with spears and grenades for suicide attacks on Americans. Swarms of suicide boats were being prepared in addition to Kamikaze planes. Look at how many civilians committed suicide during the Invasion of Okinawa to get an idea of how bad it would have been.
On the flip side, the American invasion plan was to gas the shit out of the invasion beaches and basically pound any resistance point to dust with naval gunfire. None of this sounds like a recipe for low civilian casualties.
Absolutely true. We did it so we could colonize Japan ourselves, and sold a narrative that it was necessary afterwards.
if the USSR would have invaded Hokkaido that would mean a unified korea
Probably not the first day, honestly, but it wouldn't have taken long, especially once the USSR joined the ground forces. The US managed to invade Okinawa without killing enormous numbers of civilians - the one thing you can say about the US ground forces during WWII is that they did their best to minimize civilian casualties. High command didn't care about that, though, and just wanted to show off their new bomb.
The theory that the bombs were a pre cold war cold war style tactic to threaten the Soviets doesn't really hold up to basic historical analysis. Truman dropped the bombs because above all else he feared losing public support at home for the war by losing American soldiers to a costly invasion of the home islands (to which the Japanese would probably not surrender day one, come on). Basically, he cared more about American troop lives and his position and didn't think twice about killing Japanese civilians to maybe get a chance at preserving those two things. Its equally as evil, since Truman himself didn't even believe the Japanese would surrender after the bombs (and they didn't, they surrendered 6 whole days after the bombing of Nagasaki). So, the killings weren't even justified from the ahistorical perspective that some people believe that Truman believed the bombings ensured 100% Japanese surrender.
What about Japan's repeated offers to surrender as long as they could keep their emperor?
It wasn't just about keeping the Emperor, Japan wanted to maintain Imperial Sovereignty, that is the right of the Emperor to not only be kept from removal or persecution but to stay in power as the sovereign ruler of Japan, and that included at many points during negotiation no military occupation by Allied forces, and even keeping their conquests in China. Of course the Allies wouldn't agree to these sort of terms, it's wasn't so cut-and-dry as "let us keep the Emperor as a figurehead and we will surrender".
Also, from Truman's point of view, preserving American lives was important as I pointed out, but on the other hand, the image to the public of allowing Japan to do a "soft" surrender after spending tens of thousands of troop lives would be pretty bad for his popularity too. The guy was an American president after all :amerikkka:
It's hard to know what exactly could have been agreed on as a peace deal. The Japanese starting point was keeping everything they still had but they seemed willing to negotiate that away. You're right that "keeping the emperor" meant for Japan was keeping him as the "Sovereign Ruler" and exempt from prosecution. That being said, he was already a figurehead before the US came in and he wasn't prosecuted anyway. These could have been soft diplomatic understandings rather than something written down in the actual treaty. The US was willing to do that for the Nazis, making assurances about who would and would not be prosecuted.
Yeah and that's all correct, I'm just arguing that the reason for the bombs was not a proto-cold war move against the Soviet Union. I don't think the bombs or any targeting of civilians were justified at all, but arguing the proto-cold war reasoning is something leftists tend to zoom in on too quickly without researching, it is ahistorical and adds a layer of hindsight bias coloured by our own leftist bias that simply isn't necessary in order to to condemn the bombings.
I'd argue the fascists of Japan and Germany were responsible for a good bit more 'terrorism' than the acts that make up maybe a tenth of Japan's overall civilian casualties. I'd even argue the conventional bombing of Japan was more of a terrorism than the nukes.
not to mention the side effects of the nuclear bomb
Japan would have surrendered on the first day of invasion.
You cannot convince atom bomb supporters of this. They fully believe that Japan would have held out until every man in their army was killed just to spite the US.
Not saying that's correct but it did take 6 days after the nukes for them to surrender.
shitwehraboossay spent a frightening amount of energy trying to justify the nukings along those lines iirc
the ija and ijn deserved to be nuked but amerikkka just had to nuke civilians instead and let those war criminals takeover our post-war government instead :angery:
Amerikkka was totally fine with those fascists stepping on your dicks, until their empire crossed ours.
