If you think that America showed supreme arrogance, disdain for human life, spitefulness and evil in using the atomic bombs against Japan when it was clearly winning the war…
You don’t read much history.
Yes, it’s true that those earliest nuclear weapons caused horrific death and destruction.
The first atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima, killed roughly 70,000 people immediately. Japan refused to surrender. Perhaps they reasoned that America had only one bomb, and could not make more.
The second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, killed roughly 40,000 to 70,000 people immediately.
Together, the two atomic bombs were responsible for the immediate and over-time deaths of around 140,000 people.
The atomic bomb explodes over Nagasaki
Awed and stunned by this raw power – and perhaps suddenly realizing that the ’soft’ Americans were actually willing to use such power – the hard-hearted Japanese leaders were forced to unconditionally surrender.
Compare this to the cost in lives for a conventional military invasion of Japan.
In just the Battle of Okinawa alone, the invasion and securing of the tiny islands cost over 90,000 Japanese military deaths, close to 50,000 Allied deaths, and from 75,000 to 140,000 civilians dead or missing.
That’s a total of around 280,000 lives lost to secure just a foothold from which to invade the main Japanese islands.
Victorious (at high cost) troops raise the American flag over Iwo Jima
So in the two atomic bombings, only HALF the number of casualties were incurred as compared to the invasion of Okinawa. An equal number of civilian lives were lost in Okinawa as compared to the maximum estimate for the two atomic bombs. (Yet I don’t hear much in the way of anti-conventional warfare protests.)
Okinawa had a pre-invasion population of about 500,000. That means that up to a third of the entire civilian population was killed in the World War II invasion of the islands. Add to that military deaths equal to another one third of Okinawa’s civilian population.
Part of the reason for this was the fanatical bushido code of the soldiers, who encouraged or forced civilians to hold out to the death against the Allies – or even commit mass suicide rather than surrender and ‘lose face’.
And meanwhile in the homeland of Japan, the Shosango and later Ketsugo war policies were being implemented to encourage every single man, woman and child to fight the Allies to the death… Even if they had only bamboo to use as a weapon. (I, Scott, saw footage of such World War II Japanese women undergoing bamboo spear combat drills.)
Above from Mike Kemble
Above two from Waiting Women
If the main Japanese islands had been invaded, a bloody massacre far more grueling and drawn out than Okinawa could be expected.
In 1945, Japan as a whole had a population of around 52 million… Roughly 100 times as many people as Okinawa had.
If the Japanese had not been forced to surrender by the atomic bombs, a conventional invasion might have incurred a similar casualty ratio as Okinawa had.
That would be roughly 35 million lives lost, half of those being Japanese civilians forced or propagandized into fighting to the death.
I’m not conjecturing out of thin air here – the official Allied plans for invading Japan if it refused to surrender predicted a cost of 1 million American and 10 million Japanese lives. Even after the two bombs were dropped, the military planners were unsure as to whether the stubborn Japanese leaders would keep on fighting tooth and claw.
So it’s 140,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs, versus a potential 11 to 35 million deaths from a conventional invasion of Japan.
Do the math. (Here, I’ll do it for you – 250 times more deaths would have been incurred had the two atomic bombs not been used.)
And keep in mind the massive civilian and prisoner death toll caused by the brutal Japanese invasions and occupations, such as the Rape of Nanking (300,000) the Death Railway (25,000), and the entire campaign of wiping out the ‘inferior races’ (10 million total).
Every day that the brutal Japanese bushido masters ruled, would have meant more torture and murder.
Thus IMHO, the atomic bombs were the lesser of evils and even justified to be used to quickly end the war.
Tags: atomic bomb, Battle of Okinawa, Death Railway, Fat Man, Hiroshima, Invasion of Japan, Iwo Jima, Little Boy, Nagasaki, Rape of Nanking, World War II Japan
May 28, 08 at 8:39 am
Back in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans in the military and those who were drafted into the army had their bullets taken away and forced to do menial tasks while suffering the untrusting glares of their non-Japanese American counterparts. They were forced into an all-Japanese American battalion called the 100th Battalion. The country that had given their parents the opportunity to build a new life and the promise of the American way had suddenly turned against them stripped them of their rights as Americans.
These Americans knew that their government did not trust them and felt that the only way they could prove their loyalty to America was to do it on the battlefield. Ironically, the slogan for this all-Japanese battalion was “Remember Pearl Harbor”. The land of their ancestors attacked their homeland, the United States, and it was up to them to prove themselves to their country and their fellow citizens. They were sent off to fight in parts of Europe and Africa. The fought so fiercely and ourageously, that they quickly gained the respect of their military commanders. The 100th Battalion became the most decorated unit of its size in the history of the United States.
One of the values passed on from their Issei parents to the Nisei generation was “No Make Shame”. This meant that the most important thing was to conduct oneself with honor and integrity, even if it meant dying. To do otherwise would bring shame to the family name, which was worse than death. Seeing how hard the 100th soldiers fought, the United States formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in 1943 and asked for 1500 Japanese-American volunteers in Hawaii. On the day that the US Army was hoping to get 1500 volunteers, they got over 10,000. There were alsmo many Nisei who felt so betrayed by their government that they refused to volunteer and even refused the draft. But many signed up and joined volunteers from the Mainland at training camps around the country and were sent off to war.
http://www.hawaiianoutpost.com/nissei.html
December 12, 08 at 4:49 pm
One of the best, well written arguments for the use of the two atomic bombs I have read in a long tiime. While terrible and something I hope no one ever has to see used ever again, it was truly a lesser of two evils. After the one dropped on Hiroshima, there was no need to have dropped the second one on Nagasaki had Japan just surrendered as we gave them the chance to. Those deaths are on Japan`s hands in my opinion.
December 12, 08 at 4:58 pm
Thank you, Scott. You are living proof of the superior reasoning ability of people named Scott.
lol!
January 4, 09 at 10:50 am
hello, me and my class are having a debate on the atomic bomb and im on the con side and im just gathering information on the opposite subject so im able to debate against it when they other team is presenting the case,and i would like to say u have nice information that has some opinion but is fallowed up with facts.
January 4, 09 at 8:39 pm
Uh, thank you!
January 5, 09 at 8:44 am
Actually, Scott, you left out a few other noted instances of the slaughter, enslavement and atrocities by the Imperial Japanese Army from the time in 1931 when Japan made its first incursion into China(with the complicity of the last emperor of China, Puyi)and that raping and killing in Manila by the routed same in 1945. The 50,000 ‘Sook Ching” victims in S’pore is another example.
There is little reason to doubt that the Japanese Imperial Army caused the most deaths in WW2. One can Google up the figures in Wikipedia easily enough.
Only revisionists of history and leftist idiotarians today would try to disguise or hide the facts.
March 15, 09 at 5:33 pm
While this is not perfectly scientific, here are some statistics from Wikipedia on World War II casualties for Germany and Japan.
Population
Nazi Germany 69,623,000 v. Japan 71,380,000
Military Casualties
Nazi Germany 5,533,000 v. Japan 2,120,000
Civilian Casualties:
Nazi Germany 1,540,000 v. Japan 580,000
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Casualties_by_country
Even though Japan’s population is larger than Germany’s, Nazi Germany has greater military casualties and greater civilian casualties. This may have been because the war in Germany was largely conventional while in Japan it quickly ended with the dropping of nuclear bombs.