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Japanese schoolgirls training with a machinegun for the anticipated American invasion of Japan, WW2, 1945
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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In 9th grade US history we held a mock trial about the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was assigned the role of Harry Truman, one of the defendants. I did a ton of research about the plans for invasion of Japan on both sides, and it was terrifying. The Japanese were teaching children to fight with garden tools, and US casualty estimates were over a million soldiers.
However, in the end I came to the conclusion that the nuclear strikes weren't necessary, and I wouldn't have ordered them simply because a the war was already incredibly one-sided, and an invasion wouldn't have been necessary in the first place since Japan was already on its last legs.
The class ended up convicting me of a war crime, which was nice.
Then how does the war end, in your scenario?
If I'd have been president I'd continue the (not very) strategic bombing and implement a blockade. Japan has very few natural resources and relies a lot on imports, so this would have hamstrung their military effectiveness. It would have taken a bit longer but based on my half-remembered research from almost 30 years ago it would have worked without an invasion or nukes.
IMHO the nukes were signals to Stalin that he better stop at Berlin.
There were studies done on the loss of human life that a blockade without an invasion would incur.
It was horrific. Literal millions of deaths were projected.
The terror bombing (and that's what it was, by 1945) was considerably bloodier than the atomic bombings.
War is weird.
Firebombing wooden cities night after night? All good carry on.
Poison gas? Whoa WTF are you some kind of monster.
There was a weird little side note in a debate about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Someone in the Pentagon on the pro side said, more or less: War is total. People die. If you're killed in a war, it makes absolutely no difference whether it was from being shot, or stabbed, or blown up by a nuclear bomb. People die and that's the end for them. That's war, that's what we're talking about, don't get all squeamish about it now.
I don't agree with bombing Vietnam obviously, but I do feel like there's an essential point about war there that is often papered over; people become horrified by some things about war while remaining fine with other things.
War is weird, but ultimately the concern is generally escalation/normalization of weapons. If nukes get normalized, then every military worth its salt needs one, and can use them, and that means suddenly warfare becomes much, much more bloody as a matter of averages, not just as a matter of a bomb or two vaporizing a few hundred thousand people in the occasional high-intensity war.
Yeah, agreed. I think it's by far a good thing that we've been lucky enough so far that they haven't been used beyond that one time.
I actually think there's an unspoken factor that is why people actually treat nuclear weapons so differently: There is no way in the modern day that any leader anywhere in the world can start a nuclear war and be sure it won't come back and impact them and their family. Unlike other war things, it's never safely insulated in some faraway place happening to other people.
It would be nice to think that the taboo is because of the horrible consequences, but we're doing things with horrible consequences every day. I think it's because of the pure calculus of what might happen to me and people I care about, right away.
I feel that reaching your conclusion on that basis would have been all but impossible without the benefits of hindsight.
I meant in reference to the post-war attempts at nuclear restraint, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Also, long-term effects were not known then
I mean, the problem with nuclear weapons are for the survivors. I assume getting turned into physics by a nuclear bomb isn't really painful. Then there's dying from the shockwave which is probably considerably worse already.
And then there's the radiations...
I think the non-use of nuclear weapons was a bigger deal in the Korean War. For various reasons, both sides chose to not use nuclear weapons. This included the one President that chose to deploy nuclear weapons in World War II.
The Korean peninsula could have easily become an irradiated wasteland.
That would've worked, but "working" would involve a large portion of the civilian population of Japan starving to death.
The use of the nukes was dual purpose, and yes, one of the purposes was to show to the Soviets that we not only had nukes but were willing to use them.
The other purpose was to demonstrate to Japan that continuing the war was hopeless, regardless of the number of schoolgirls with machine guns they had. It was to show that we didn't need to invade to flatten their cities. One plane, one bomb, one parking lot. Perhaps luckily for all involved they did not know we did not have the capability readily available to make any more atomic bombs just yet.
One minor point: We had already flattened their cities with firebombs, so they knew we could do it without invading.
The difference was scale. It would have likely taken nearly all of the air assets the Allies had around Japan at the time to flatten one city with firebombs, and the Allies would have taken some losses in aircraft.
Now project out the idea that each of the dozens of planes used in a firebombing a city each only carried one bomb with the same flattened city as a result. It was projecting the idea that all cities in Japan could have literally been flattened in one day.
Now, we didn't have the bombs or the air force assets to do that at the time, but that wasn't known to the Japanese. Hiroshima was hit, then three days later Nagasaki. It would appear at the time as though the Americans were going to keep going every three days with a new city flattened with nothing the Japanese could do to prevent it except surrender.
That would result in millions starving to death. There were no good options.
I really don’t get Truman’s calculus to use the bomb except to inflict massive casualties, which may have been what he wanted to show the Soviets after all — Truman was willing to obliterate entire populations.
Since there were plenty of other examples of this (ex Dresden) with conventional explosives and fire bombing, I’m pretty sure he just wanted to test his new toy.
But either you'd be strategically weakening the country to give invading forces an easier time, at which point you're throwing civilians into the meat grinder anyway, or you're starving the country until it devolves into literal anarchy, because the only people in the position to surrender were entrenched enough that they'd be the last one to see their power structure fall apart.
The Japanese weren't exactly known for surrender. It's easy to arm chair judge but I'm doubtful anything less than terrifying overwhelming force would have been enough. Sometimes there's only bad options.
So the best case we'd have ended with another North Korea pariah state.
Unfortunately a brighter future sometimes requires brutal action, but you can never tell in the moment whether you saved something or are just a monster
Not comment-OP, but here's a credible scenario: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/
Japan as another USSR satellite to be stripped for parts
Exactly how it would've ended in our world if the US wasn't a hellhole - wait a few more months and Japan surrenders by internal strife.
Those estimates have actually grown enormously as the years have passed, not surprisingly in parallel with the growth in criticism of the US for using the atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Estimates at the time were in the neighborhood of 50,000 allied casualties (where "casualties" include wounded and captured as well as killed); Truman at one point started throwing out 500,000 dead as a round number, and now in modern times we have "over a million" as a common estimate. In reality, who knows? One of the options being considered at the time as an alternative to invasion was just to continue the conventional firebombing as well as the submarine-based blockade of all of Japan's shipping, and starving Japan into eventual surrender without incurring a very high number of allied casualties in the process.
It's worth noting that a three-day firebombing campaign against Tokyo in March 1943 (using conventional ordinance) produced more Japanese casualties than did the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings combined.
That's a pretty fair argument, I was taking the 1 Million at face value previously and if it were true then the bombs would be an obvious choice. Basically, as long as the reliable estimate stays below the 226,000 (althought we only have that upper estimate in hindsight) casualties from the bombs then the bombs should not be dropped because all lives should be considered equal.
However, there are a total of 1,326,076 killed or missing Japanese Soldiers from 1937 to 1945 not including the injured or captured, so maybe you're being a bit silly with the lowball 50,000 estimate from an Operation Downfall.
Well, it wasn't me saying that. However, it's worth considering that the US only had about 90,000 soldiers killed in France and Germany from D-Day through to the end of the war, and while they were only facing about a fourth of the German military (the rest being occupied with the Soviets), that still represented manpower greater than what Japan had available with most of its army being trapped in China. And Germany had a still-mostly-intact industrial base more than capable of equipping its troops with as much modern weaponry (guns, artillery, ammunition, tanks and armored vehicles and airplanes) while Japan's industrial base (which had never been anywhere near Germany's in terms of productive capacity to begin with) had been smashed almost to nothingness. Schoolgirls with machine guns (and very little ammo) have much less military effectiveness than perhaps people imagine.
If 50,000 casualties would have proved to be an underestimate of the cost of an invasion, it likely would have been the result not of angry common Japanese armed with sharp sticks and fighting to the bitter end, but of the 6,000 to 10,000 planes the Japanese had amassed and hidden away for use as kamikazes. These piloted bombs (which were really one of the most devastating weapons of the war) caused considerable carnage despite the US' air supremacy; unleashed against large troop transports carrying thousands of soldiers each which of necessity would have had to have come very close to the Japanese coast, they might well have killed a lot more than 50,000 soldiers.
In reality the USSR was planning the invasion of Japan and was strongly prepared for it, no American lives would have been lost and Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't actually a factor in Japan's surrender anyway.
... Jesus give me strength.
Children are more competent than our international institutions, that's reassuring.
Holy shit. That's a hell of an assignment for 14 year olds. Military historians and experts today debate the efficacy of the nuclear strikes and the jury is still out on if they were better than not.
I had a really great teacher. She was very much about us learning from original sources and thinking critically about the historical context of them.
My 11th grade history teacher, on the other hand, showed us Monty Python and the Holy Grail as part of our study of the medieval period.
im not too suprised, had the same topic for debate back in highschool in 11th grade. Thuradays were debate days which was always themed on what part of history the class was on. the debates werent about what what you believed in, but was used as a tool to get students to study the reasoning on both sides.
ill put a disclaimer that it was a very demanding and difficult class (id argue harder than half of my college classes), but people went into it because of two things, it prepared any student for college, and it had the highest AP passing score at the school, so it was a tried and true method.
You came to the conclusion that it was better to kill 1,000,000 people bare minimum than 226,000 people upper estimate?
I feel like when presented with those options you're directly responsible for every life you didn't save.
Even though I am an American, my primary school education is from a school for British expats so my WWII knowledge is mostly European focused. What was the beef between the US and Japan that led to the bombing of Pearl Harbor?
I don't understand why they threw two bombs. Only would have been plenty if they wanted to prove a point.
After the first bomb, there was still hesitance in Japan's high command about surrendering. After the second, a group of officers tried to coup the Japanese government to stop it from surrendering in response to the bombs.
So much emphasis is put on the fanatical atrocities of the Nazis that the fanatical atrocities of the Japanese are often overlooked in popular history. It wasn't a matter like fascist Italy, where they were ready to give up as soon as they lost.
Supernova in the East is an amazing series as part of Hardcore History and goes into detail about how one works their way up to bombing someone with nuclear weapons as a perceived act of mercy. Many voices thought the only way to make war less terrible was to make it quick.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-Supernova-in-the-East-i/
If you only detonate one they think you only have one. If you detonate two they know you can make more than one, and they don't know how many you have.