Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Question

What do people think about the bombs thrown during World War II? In movies because they are american, you only see the bad side of what the americans had, but in Japan people are having mutations due to radiation and caused MUCH more damage that what America had.

Answer 1

Well, ok.  The atomic bombings were horrific.  Of that there's no doubt.  However, it's fair to say that nobody really understood the threats posed by radiation sickness in the employment of the bombs.  By 1950, the US was still testing nuclear artillery shells and hydrogen bombs in close proximity to live American servicemen, without understanding the long term effects.  

Moreover, you need to consider the American point of view.  After Saipan and Okinawa, it seemed perfectly clear to the American leadership that the Japanese would continue to fight fanatically, and that the Americans would be forced to invade and conquer the Home Islands by force.  The estimated death toll from that sort of operation was 250,000 or so KIA and 700,000 or so WIA on the American side.  The cost to the Japanese military would have been considerably higher, and the cost to Japanese civilians (as with any civilian population caught in the crossfire of modern warfare) would have been catastrophic.  The bombs were dropped in the hope of avoiding the necessity of invasion.  

Finally, you might note that conventional bombs had killed more people in a single raid (the Tokyo Fire Storm) than died in either one of the atom bomb blasts.  So while the atomic blasts were nasty, but they were not that much worse than the conventional raids, merely more efficient.

Answer 2

They tortured American prisoners and would have continued to do so. More Americans would have died had the invasion of Japan come as Japan resulted to Guerilla warfare, booby traps, etc. Also had we not dropped those bombs the Soviet Union would have helped us invade Japan and would have certainly demanded a substantial portion of it to be placed under their mandate.

Answer 3

You have to stop and consider a few things.  Imagine you're a solder in WW2, you're part of what's going to be the largest invasion ever, the invasion of Japan.  Reports are that losses are going to be very high, you hear rumors of what happened on Iwo Jima, horrible stories.  Japanese soldiers fighting to the end, burned flesh, lost friends and comrades.  Now add in the fact that Japan is training women and children to fight the invasion!  In order to survive the invasion alive, and your friends you might have to kill a child!

That is a horrible thought.  Now lets say the US advisers say not to use the bombs, but invade instead.  (They think the risk of the bombs too great and the side effects are too horrible.)

You are on the seventh attack wave.  You survive the war with no knowledge of the bombs, or the plans to use them.  You came face to face with a child, bearing a spear, heading straight for a friend.  Your friend is speared and killed, the child then turns to you.  Instinct kicks in and you shoot, killing the child.  You live with that then years later learn that the US government had a weapon that could have stopped the war without an invasion.

How'd you feel?

Now think about the Japanese, they lose hundreds, thousands, (tens or hundreds of thousands) of men, women and children in the battle, only to learn that a weapon might have stopped the war before the invasion.  You sacrifice two cities, but the rest of your country, it wouldn't have undergone the h**l of ground fighting.

How'd you feel?

In this case, I feel that for what could have happened, the bombs were the less of the evils.

Answer 4

I think that if you decide to conquer most of the Pacific and China, for your own greed, and attack the USA, you end up paying a terrible price, so I have no sympathy for the WWII Japanese.

Answer 5

if they didnt drop the bomb 6 million more americans would have died and countless japanese over 18 million

Answer 6

I don't care what everyone thinks. What i think is USA sucks, Japan Rocks, and it was extremely inhuman to drop such a destructive (Permanently destructive) bomb that actually hurt many of the innocent civilians that were not fighting in the war. I do know that the Japanese tortured some soldiers but then again, those soldiers came and threatened their country and they had something to do with the war, unlike the millions of civilians killed and mutated from the bombing.

Answer 7

I believe that the atomic bombs were originally planned to be dropped on Germany and other Axis nations. The process involved so much manpower, money, and the nation had a vested interest in what it could do. However once the Axis powers signed a peace treaty we had a bomb without a site to drop it. Therefore the government dropped it on Japan, an island nation isolated and unable to spread radiation to our Allied nations.

Answer 8

1.  Americans suffered very little due to the use of the atomic bombs.  I imagine you could stretch it a bit to argue that the program to build the atomic bombs had some negative affects (some Americans killed or hurt) but that program would have happened whether we used the bomb or not.

2.  I believe the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified.

--we asked Japan to surrender in early August prior to dropping the bomb and Japan refused.  As per agreement at Potsdam, we then bombed Hiroshima and asked for surrender.  They refused.  Russia then invaded Manchuria, Korea and the Kurilea and we asked for surrender.  They refused.  We bombed Nagasaki and asked for surrender--refused.  Only when the Emperor personally intervened did Japan decide to surrender and even then there was an attempted coup to prevent the surrender.

--as the war turned against the Japanese, the War Ministry in Tokyo issued an edict that ALL prisoners of war were to be killed by any means possible.  100 civilian construction workers captured at Wake Island were beheaded at once.  Another 100 Australian POW's were tied to posts and used for bayonet practice.  Two prisons (one in the Philippines, another in Tokyo), all the American POWs were set afire and burned to death.  At another camp, 100 POW (one at a time) were eaten by Japanese captors (some had livers or kidney's removed when they were alive and then died on their own, others were killed first).  At Chichi Jima, all US POWs were killed by beheading or bayoneting and then body parts eaten.  Several hundred thousand chinese soldiers were captured by the Japanese, 56 were alive at war's end.  Some American POWs were beheaded AFTER the surrender.  If the war had been allowed to go on another 3-6 months, it is likely that all Allied POWs would have been "executed" by then.

--The Japanese had tried to send the message that they would fight to the death.  At Iwo Jima (first capture of imperial soil), the Marines suffered more casualties than the defenders--first time that happened in the Island hoping campaign.  At Okinawa, our casualties (sea and land) were the highest they'd been all war.  Even worse, because of lies by the Japanese military, 1/4 of the civilians on Okinawa killed themselves rather than allow themselves to be captured by American forces (they'd been told we'd rape and torture them).  Estimates of US casualties for a landing on the mainland (starting with Kyushu) were 250k US dead and a total of 1 million casualties, another 1 million dead for the other islands.  If 1/4 of Okinawa's populace killed themselves, that same ratio would have resulted in about 8 million dead Japanese civilians.

--The argument that Japan was negotiating and ready to give up is revisionist.  First, the Japanese were training women on the mainland to charge our troops with bamboo spears, children were to approach tanks with anti-tank mines.  You don't engage in that training unless you're planning a defense of the mainland.  Second, the supposed negotiations involved the Russians (who at the time weren't at war with the Japanese) and the Vatican (who had cozied up to the n***s).  The Russians certainly didn't take the negotiations seriously--they never mentioned them at Potsdam.  Finally, we ASKED the Japanese to surrender repeatedly before and during the use of the bombs and they refused.  Only the personal intervention of the emperor changed things.  Finally, both Russia and the US had good reason to distrust Japanese attempts to negotiate.  The attack on Port Arthur (against the Russians in the Russo-Japan war) and Pearl Harbor (bringing the US into the war) both occurred while negotiating with the Japanese--they were both surprise attacks in the middle of discussions.  The Japanese destroyed any credibility they had around negotiations.

By the way, the argument that we'd developed therefore felt compelled to use it is just.....nonsense.  We also worked on chemical and biological weapons (as a deterrent) yet never used them in the war.  Finally, the atomic bomb wasn't ready to use in Europe.  And the Germans were surrendering in droves.  The most POWs we ever got from the Japanese prior to Okinawa was 600.

I'm sorry for the death, destruction and damage caused by the atomic bombs--they're horrible weapons.  But the death, destruction and damage caused by fire bombing was far worse (and Japan still didn't surrender after that campaign).

Finally, I don't know where you get the argument that "in movies" yada, yada.  I can't think of any movie that portrays the use of the atom bomb.  There are a few on the making of it.  None of those movies imply that by using the bomb hundreds or thousands of Americans were hurt or killed.  I think the argument is simpler:  Japan attacked America, we were at war, the Japan refused to surrender.  In a war in which the Japanese used bubonic plague, tested biological weapons on POWs, killed nearly 30 million people (most of them asian civilians), we resorted to nearly all weapons we had.  Some of those weapons may be distasteful but I they their use was justified if it ended the war and prevented death of the POWs and an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Answer 9

I feel sorry for those affected by those bombs but with what I have read ,I still think president Truman did the right thing.With out the bombs the war was supposed last several more years and cost countless lives on both sides .I think it would have . I think the battle of Japan would have been 50 time worse the the battles of Okinawa and Iwo Jima

Answer 10

By asking here, you can only get another American view.