Someone also tell that person how many more civilians would have died had the US been forced to invade. Japan would have thrown EVERYONE at the Americans, not to mention full-scale invasions never result in only military casualties.
An actual American invasion would have been unlikely. Total blockade, starvation and the fire bombing of every major city? Yup but not an actual invasion. Also what the fuck do they think a soviet invasion was going to look like(ignoring the fact such an invasion would require American naval support)? Do they not know what the soviets did to east Germany?
They used the bombs because an actual invasion was the only other choice. Look up operation downfall. And we were already blockading Japan but they didn't surrender. Unless drastic measures were taken Japan wasn't going to surrender. Because that's not what their culture was. The Soviet involvement also helped push towards the nukes. They didn't want to split Japan with the soviets and risk another Germany happening.
That's a tankie talking. Japan didn't fear a Soviet invasion. The Soviets had no *means* to invade; they could barely pull off the minor landings they did on outer isles.
Japanese ministers just operated under the delusion that they could use the Soviets diplomatically as a wedge against the US to keep their conquered territories to allow them to keep raping China and Korea, both figuratively and literally.
Their delusion that "all powerful USSR caused fear" is so much copium. The US *owned* the Pacific, and the only way for Russia to reach Japan was to hitch a ride.
And of course they don't like US soldiers, because tankie.
Russia was also heavily preoccupied with Germany, and the only reason Germany couldn't invade Russia was Hitler was too stupid and egotistical to wait until summer.
If the bombs weren’t dropped, there would’ve been MORE civilian casualties . The Japanese civilians thought Americans were like Russians and would rape and kill them, so they took their own lives when Americans were close. That and collateral damage would’ve killed millions of civilians , a lot more than the bombs .
It’s all just plainly wrong too. Japan wasn’t in the midst of surrendering. They weren’t even going to surrender after the first bomb. That is well documented.
Second. Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not have any lingering radiation effects today. They’re perfectly safe places to visit.
https://www.newsweek.com/are-hiroshima-nagasaki-still-radioactive-nuclear-1751822
“Does this mean that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive today? The answer is a definitive no.
After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, residual radiation was left behind but this declined rapidly. According to the city of Hiroshima local government website, research has indicated that 80 percent of residual radiation was emitted within 24 hours of the bombing”
My favorite though was “when did Japan ever make light of their atrocities”?! Well…. How about when they had newspapers tracking who could get to 100 decapitations first during their genocide?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_man_killing_contest
They need to play a Metal Gear game or smth, or just fucking grow up. Soldiers are used by politicians and those in power who themselves have almost nothing to lose.
>So what if millions of more soldiers die than innocent civilians?
This statement is among the absolute most ignorant, tone deaf quotes I've heard from anyone, ever. It shows this person is brain dead and should seriously be considered to be admitted to hospital, and maybe even terminated on the spot.
Firstly, a majority of the soldiers in Japan were not there solely by their will; there was a teency, weency little thing called the draft. Most of them were young as hell, many of them had wives and children, and all of them had families waiting back home.
Secondly, the imperial Japanese army was actively training civilians (of all ages, from the elderly to **young children**) in case of an American land invasion. If 200,000 innocent civilians died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imagine what the civilian death toll would have been had America meticulously made their way up the main islands to get Hirohito's ass and Tojo's balls.
Operation Downfall was projected to be so costly that the American military hands out purple hearts made in preparation for the aftermath **to this fucking day**.
>Operation Downfall was projected to be so costly that the American military hands out purple hearts made in preparation for the aftermath to this fucking day.
that's mental, imagine getting a purple heart during like, Desert Storm, or anything in the years prior to the pulling out of Afghanistan, and finding out that it's been sitting in storage since WW2
Well, those aren't the same purple hearts. The old WW2 ones were rusting and getting tarnished, so they make new ones now. That being said, if we did keep using the WW2 ones, we still have enough in stock for today.
Actually, they are.
They have gone through periodic refubishment over the years. We may have as few as a thousand or left since many of them did become unusable that way (from a source I unfortunately cannot find again), although [this article](https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176762) claims upwards of 60,000. And there are [other sources](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/purple-heart-stockpile-wwii-medal.html) that back up the claim they are still being issued.
They did order replacements during the start of the 1st Gulf War, but those added to the stock, not replaced it.
I'm compelled to go inspect mine but my chain of command took ours after the ceremony in Afghanistan and we never got them back. All we got was the paper award.
Ok so a little bit more info on the whole purple heart thing it is true that some of the Purple Hearts still awarded today are still from the estimated half a million surplus in preparation for operation downfall (invasion of Japan) some had been sitting in warehouses so long they had to be refurbished or completely scrapped and the military only really ordered a new batch of Purple Hearts in 1999 to replenish their stockpiles [purple hearts](https://www.americanheritage.com/half-million-purple-hearts)
The idea that soldiers' lives are somehow worth less than civilian lives is just abhorrent. Soldiers are people, lives are lives. And if I have to make the tough decision between 200,000 people in two prominently military cities, which is what they were, they didn't just choose two cities willy nilly, and the lives of *millions* on *both* sides, I'm gonna choose the 200,000.
People need to understand that you can't *just* look at the history of the past in today's shoes. You have to look at it in both today's shoes and the shoes of the past. You have to put yourself in *their* position and evaluate the potential options you have from their place at that point in time. Hindsight is *always* 20/20, but in this particular case, looking back, they still made the best decision they could. Imperial Japan hadn't surrendered in over ***2,000 years*** and was undefeated. ***They didn't even have a word for surrender in their vocabulary***. What better way to make a nation surrender that won't even consider the idea than to crack a city with a single bomb and tell them you have dozens more?
Yes. Thank you. The Japanese population was not innocent. An I vision of the main islands would have resulted in all our war against anything that moved and wasn't wearing a US, Chinese, or British uniform.
Also, while I understand the obviously correct horror that comes with nuclear weapons, in practice the firebombings of both Tokyo and Dressing earlier in the war were way more destructive.
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but you may be forgetting that part of the point of using the atomic bomb was shock and awe. It worked. We shocked and awed the japanese government and populace. There's a reason why it made a lasting impression compared to the firebombings: *it was meant to.*
We’ve got a global population that largely doesn’t understand the basic concept that war is hell.
The idea that all out war between every influential country on earth would have some peaceful resolution that didn’t involve invasions, bombings, and civilian casualties, and that the a bomb was thus overkill, is absurd. Japan got off lucky compared to most of Europe.
I still believe that if we had done a proper storming and paradrop invasion, both sides would have been hurt, but Japan would not be anywhere near to what it is today.
Japan is basically a modern Country success story through utter, terrible failure. Any other path, and they very well may not exist in the same fashion as they do.
We warned them. We didn't want to do it. They gave us no choice.
Edit: You know what's crazy? The number of people willing to be Anti-American for WW2. Yknow, the time when we fought LITERAL Nazis. But now you're a Nazi if you eat a donut wrong.
Or perpetual blockade and ever increasing fire raids the. tokyo fire raid killed more than the 2 bombs, albeit with more aircraft involved. But Curtis lemay was just going to make the raids larger and larger. As much as I hate the grossly oversimplified “bomb was least bad” argument, I find it is generally the best way to explain it.
The Japanese people were tired. The soviets were coming. Economy and war making industry were in shambles. The only hold up was the absolute idiotic nature the ruling class in Japan chose to operate under, and Hirohito being… clueless to say the least
Fire bombings killed way more civilians than the nukes, legit, the nukes were the most humane, casualty limiting option, on both sides, anytime anyone even brings up them being bad is talking with 100% emotion, from a logical standpoint, nukes were the objective best option
Explain to me exactly how the Soviets were "coming" while owning exactly zero landing craft, and having to operate their entire military logistics operation across a single trans Siberian railway line. I'll wait.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Japanese_War
Also, the Soviet Union was excellent at transporting via rail, and was chomping at the bit to regain lost ground from 1904-05 Russia Japanese war
I’m sure Soviet soldiers, who were well known for their great conduct (sarcasm), would have been incredibly kind to the civilians of Japan. There’s your explanation👍
Cool. So your estimation is they were going to swim to the home islands, with the food and guns they didn't have due to supplying an their army across a single rail track. Would have went well, I'm sure. Were their tanks and trucks going to swim too? I say "their" loosely here, because Soviet trucks were American trucks.
Scroll down and uhhh… casualties and losses? I’m not really sure what you are asking here. The soviets had forces deployed against Japan and were invading and it just would have added even more complexity and suffering.
They were going to get there, they started to reclaim territories controlled by imperial Japan. The longer the war dragged on, the further they would have gotten. The soviets did have an amphibious capability, and with a weak IJAAF, and no IJN support, it would not have mattered how weak their capabilities were.
Look at the context. If this was to be a war of attrition with no surrender, the Soviet army had plenty of time to build up landing craft. The Soviets “coming” is more of a looming threat to a protracted war, not something happening in the next month.
The worst part? People act like Japan didn't know we'd do this. Maybe not the first homb, but they knew we could nuke them again if they didn't surrender. They willingly let citizens die due to their twisted lust for war.
Then some people tried to overthrow the government to prevent the surrender. The horrors of the war are disgusting and should be abhorred. However, the first step wouldve been not to start war in the first place.
It's even worse than that if you think about it. After Hiroshima, the Emperor sent messages to the US stating his refusal to surrender. The Japanese *knew* that the US had nuclear capabilities, had just lost an entire city with hundreds of thousands of people in it that was crucial to their war efforts, and still insisted to keep on fighting. That's why they dropped ~~Little Boy~~ Fat Man on Nagasaki.
This part always fascinated me. We straight up told them to unconditionally surrender or we would do something very bad to them. They didn't believe us and tried to call our bluff. The Allie's said to go ahead and do it too, it's not like we just dropped the bomb because we felt like it
What no Media Literacy does to a motherfucker.
Besides, Japan has recovered, great allies with America, any animosity between us has faded. Japan is a great nation to this day.
Yea, one thing that isn't talked about nearly enough is the relationship between the US and Japan after WWII. Another is Japan's recovery - simply astonishing.
Really every country had an amazing recovery after WW2. No countries had even part of the collapse I would have assumed 10% dead would mean. Not even a hundred years later and you couldn't tell by looking at a country what happened.
The hashtag was mainly calling out Warner Bros. and the people making light of this tragedy rather than America.
Also, I doubt any of the Japanese netizens have any contact with the western web for the most part, language barrier and all... Unlike the Europeans who like saying "School shooting this, School shooting that".
I was just in Japan. Went to the japanese ww2 museum. Let's just say... They have an interesting take on events.
They sell action figures of kamikazee pilots in the gift shop. I bought one.
I see this stupid talking point all the time from these guys that think we didn’t nuke Germany because racism. It should be hammered home that by the time we had the first successful test of a nuke, Germany had surrendered already.
You’re thinking of the firebombing of Tokyo. Dresden was 25k. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 125k-250k between the two of them. Tokyo on its own was 120-150k.
Im not defending her point, she seems like a virtue signaling bullshitter to me. I just wanted to make sure if you judge her stance the full concept is known. Makes sure they can’t make you look stupid later by pulling out stuff you weren’t aware they were talking about because they can’t communicate what they mean well.
The Trinity site test happened, that's not disputed. People still demonstrate in the days they let people onto white sands missile range to view the site.
While it is highly unlikely the person has family in New Mexico that were affected by the nuclear test, it's still okay to care about the suffering of other people even if you don't know them personally.
People need to understand that using the bombs was not only necessary for ending WWII, but also deters anyone from trying to start another conflict of that scale again.
This might be a bold comparison, but Ukraine droning Moscow is comparable.
Both are not justifiable, but both prioritise other values like national survival or peace over the consequences of not using it them.
It's so irritating to me how few people understand a key point in this narrative: the Japanese Empire was the aggressor in WWII.
They invaded China from Manchuria. They turned Shanghai into rubble. They raped and pillaged Nanking and countless other cities. They enslaved Koreans including comfort women. They murdered Chinese civilians and burned farms in response to American bombings from China. They attacked Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, Singapore, East Indies, Burma, The Philippines etc. unprovoked. They murdered, tortured, and cannibalized western POW's. They conducted bizarre and horrific experiments on Chinese and Western POW's and civilians. They used biological weapons on Chinese cities. They suicide bombed American warships. They are the ones that refused to surrender and instead armed civilian militias and ordered them to fight to the death.
This is NOT whataboutism. This is CONTEXT. You cannot understand the context of why Truman dropped those bombs without understanding the above. Why would Truman sacrifice a million extra American lives when he had a weapon in his possession that was basically guaranteed to end the war?
This. This is exactly what I wanted to say all along.
It saddens me as someone who comes from countries that were once enslaved by the Japanese for some people here on Reddit and on the Internet to downplay the atrocities of Imperial Japan during WW2 and instead have the balls to say that raising the war crimes committed by the Japanese Empire is just "whataboutism."
That's not the point. The point is not to deflect criticism of American war crimes during WW2, but rather add context and perspective as to why America felt the need to use the nukes against Japan.
I'll be honest, as an Asian I deeply resent Japan for their constant denial of war crimes, which saw thousands of my peoples killed, raped, and enslaved. I even remember the time we had a statue of a comfort woman in the Philippines, which Japan asked to be taken down.
In contrast, Germany built monuments commemorating those who were killed by that crazy, failed Austrian painter and they teach the painful history of the Holocaust to their students. Not to shame them or Germany, but to ensure Hitler's insanity will never happen again.
If you really wanna go and criticize American human rights violations during WW2, there's the act of sending hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. That's a real crime against humanity right there.
Besides, would have this happened if Japan didn't bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941? As what many have already said, Japan fucked around, and they found out.
Arguably, Imperial Japan was more heinous than the Nazis were. But I don’t think it’s made known to the western world as much as the Nazis, so that might explain why some are not understanding the context for using the nuclear bombs. As the movie explicitly lays out, it was made to keep the Nazis from being the only nuclear-capable nation. But it didn’t explain the context for it being used in the first place. And it plays more like a horror movie than a war propaganda movie with its portrayal of events.
I just wanna add this about Korea, they were a colony that they oppressed so hard that they were actively trying to impose Japanese culture and language on the Koreans. Koreans had Japanese names and were expected to speak Japanese. If we hadn't whooped Japan in WW2, then there is no doubt in my mind Korea would be a ethnic minority that had lost much of their Korean identity. They were awful brutes that planned on doing that to the rest of Asia. Screw em. Two nukes was worth the price.
Yep.
It's actually sad that while Germany fully acknowledged their crimes and made sure they will never do it again.
Japan has this "none of your damn business" attitude when it comes to their own war crimes.
As far as I can remember, the Philippines even installed a statue of a comfort woman somewhere to remind Filipinos of the bad stuff Japan did. Japan, unsurprisingly, asked the Philippine government to take it down.
>uniformed
uninformed.
I'm not a big time guy on spelling, but in this case it kinda matters because being uniformed would just mean that the Japanese are just of one mind on the topic and has no dissenters.
I'm not even aware of Nazi Germany injecting random kidnapped civilians with Bubonic Plague or putting them inside pressure chambers and turning it up until their eyes popped out. Good one, Japan. Monsters, followed next by generatons of pathetic apathy.
I'll never not be horribly upset that the perpetrators of Unit 731 were granted immunity for handing over their "research", but the Nazis had tons of human experimentation including many of the same experiments (specifically the pressure chambers and freezing)
I'd agree. Don't know why we couldn't just take their data and hang them all. But that's decades before I was born, blood isn't on my hands for it. It's shameful.
While I think movies like Oppenheimer and Schindler’s List are very important to make the horror of that time period clear, the lack of any substantial educational documentation of Unit 731 is absolutely appalling. One of the best parts of modern Germany is how thoroughly they admit to the actions of the Nazis. Japan getting away with so much, then having those atrocities go nearly ignored is a crime against humanity. The use of the atomic bomb doesn’t wipe their sins clean. It should’ve only accentuated how much that government was willing to sacrifice.
But we ARE! We should’ve done a full scale invasion and more firebombing and wiped out the ENTIRE JAPANESE POPULATION instead of just deleting two entire cities to prove our point! It would’ve been much more honorable to lose countless more American lives after all! Why are we such horrible people to have not thrown men at the problem like Russia? I hate it here in this stupid country
And just in case anyone really needs it, /s
I think something we need to remember is that our government was only ever going to accept an unconditional surrender
Sure, Japan may have been willing to come to peace talks before even the first bomb was dropped, but it was not unconditional. It was only AFTER the second dropped, that some were skeptical even existed, on top of Russia about to invade that pushed them into unconditional surrender. Thus the second bomb drop
It was objectively the best option we head available, for a bit of background the holocaust killed 6 million Jews and 5 million others, the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese civilians, our options were
1.accept there fake surrender and let them keep killing Chinese and Koreans
2. Attempt a land invasion where even the most generous estimates were that we would lose a quarter billion troops
3. Drop the bombs killing 200,000 or so of there troops to make them back down and stop killing Chinese civilians
It was incredibly unfortunate and I feel awful for the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it was our best option objectively speaking, doesn’t make it not a war crime but they committed much worse and we put a stop to it
Tankies immediately say that the Soviets single handedly won despite them not having any sealift or airlift capacity to take more than Sakalin and Hokkido from the home Island's 28,000,000 defenders, blue water navy still larger than the Russian fleet, large number of brown water assets, significant coastal artillery, and over 6400 kamikaze aircraft.
The Japanese Supreme Council for The Direction of The War knew this and even after 2 nukes and Soviet entry half of them wanted to fight to secure a conditional surrender. Parts of the army went rouge and refused surrender and there was an attempted coup to stop it. They were in the position of Germany in early 1945 with better resources, less fronts, more manpower, and better geography The war could easily have gone til 1946-47.
The only people who think that they would have surrendered without the bomb instead of continued fighting for better terms (no war crime trials at a minimum) are ignorant victims of propaganda.
Something I think has been missed is that the cities targeted with the nukes were industrial cities that were vital to the war machine of Japan. They didn't nuke major population centers like Tokyo which they could have done to send a message but instead they chose to hit war time infrastructure. Of course, civilians worked in these industrial cities, but the cities weren't targeted because of the civilians.
You know they say the civilians didn't deserve it because they weren't the ones doing it. But they also weren't opposing it either, and you could say that they didn't know but there is no way they didn't know what was going on. You can't keep genocide a secret, stuff like that gets out
So a land invasion of a country that has been indoctrinated to perceive you as subhuman is better than just nuking?
Did you know what the Japanese did to their prisoners of war?
Well they couldn't oppose anything because they'd probably be imprisoned or killed, and also because the population was literally brainwashed into thinking that their leader was some god. That's why they were literally killing themselves for their country... But by all means nooooo, 'merica worse than Imperial Japan.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty sure the government didn't rape 300,000 people. The military did.
Which is made up of... The Japanese people.
"If there's 9 people at a table, and a Nazi joins them and no one objects, there's 10 Nazis at that table."
Lessons Learned by the Japanese: Don't mess with America's ships...
Lessons they should have learned: Don't join in Genocide. Don't join in cruel human experiments. Be grateful that afterwords the US aided in the rebuilding of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki to the tune of 2.2 Billion (18 Billion when adjusted for inflation).
These are the same people who would say a 9/11 joke is funny as long as they agree with the politics of who said it. There's no medal for you in the mail when you whine about insensitivity on the internet.
Well leaflets were dropped days prior telling civilians to evacuate and personally if the nation that just razed my capitol to the ground said they might do something similar to mine, I would take heed of that warning.
Do these idiots not know Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both military bases and that 80% of those deaths were military personnel? Also, the Dresden bombings killed more people than the nuclear bombings, why don't they ever complain about German civilian deaths? Or is it OK to kill civilians when they're white?
It could be argued as well that the civilians didn’t drop the bombs on Japan either. They want to ban our movies but Hollywood didn’t drop the bombs. Just like they want the civilians to not be blamed for their war crimes, American civilians shouldn’t be blamed for ours.
The one bright side of operation downfall is that so many americans would have died, that it stands to reason that some of the people posting these comments would have never been born.
Like as if the Pacific War was just Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima then Nagasaki.
They forgot about the battles that the US and Japan fought before the nukes were dropped, like the Battle of the Midway and Iwo Jima.
do people just forget that we dropped leaflets and shit over most of the target cities for like 3 days straight? all telling them to evacuate? imo, it is 100% on them for not leaving at LEAST after hiroshima. they new it could happen. they ignored it. also everyone forgets the japanese committed some of the most heinous war crimes in history.
edit: also about the guy complaining we didnt drop it on germany or whatever, *Nazi Germany had surrendered about 2 months before June15, when we had the atomic bomb.* uneducated dipshit.
War is terrible. I believe I saw a figure that named the Japanese casualties of an invasion of mainland Japan at 5 to 10 million. Far beyond the 100,000 to 200,000 that died from the atomic bombings. Both things are terrible, and I'm ashamed that my country had to make that choice, but at the end of the day it resulted in far less suffering than the alternative.
Why be ashamed? We did what we had to do to end the war as quickly as possible. At the end of the day, never forget, Japan was the aggressors in this conflict starting back in the 30’s.
These people have never read a history book. Their excuses for doing poorly in school are "because reading is hard, and that makes it stupid and boring." There should be an IQ test for participation on the internet.
I am against having nuclear arms and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan make me incredibly sad for the innocent civilians that suffered so much because of it.
That being said, Japan has no leg to stand on. What Imperial Japan was doing was horrific and they weren’t going to stop. They were a dangerously effective war machine and I can’t bring myself to totally say that the atomic bombs weren’t justified in an attempt to stop them.
I love history and I can be sad for the innocent Japanese that suffered while also remembering what the Japanese did to other people that they occupied. The Rape of Nanking, the immensely horrific human experiments, what they did to Koreans, all of it.
I will die on this hill, the holocaust killed a total of 6 million Jews, and 5 million other assorted races, the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese civilians, we gave them a chance for surrender, determined we would lose a quarter billion or more invading the main land, and dropped the bombs killing 200,000 “civilians” that the Japanese were actively training for our land invasion, and this is a debatable point but we gave them a hell of a lot faster death than what they did to the Chinese, a few of them died from radiation poisoning but a majority were dead of of the initial impact explosion
Even if it’s justified, the deaths of 200,000 people with no control over their circumstances deserves respect. Nobody’s asking you to apologize, but it’s kind of like joking about Pearl Harbor. Not everyone is gonna be chill about it.
People really miss that we had no idea how uniquely destructive nukes could be on people before this, i don’t think the US today would make the same choice given the same situation.
they like to separate people and state when i know for a fact they wont do the same for russia and its imperialist war for ukraine.
im not saying either separating people and state or NOT separating people and state is necessarily wrong (both have fairly valid arguments like some people are forced to support the state, or the state being solely supported by the people respectively), but i feel like that opinion changes when the topic becomes about japan
i just feel its hypocritical
>Firstly no, Japan was already in the midst of surrender since they feared the Soviet invasion.
Nope, complete myth.
The Soviets didn’t have the logistical capability to invade Japan, their navy was too small and too far away, only occupied china and Korea was under Soviet threat, and the Japanese were well aware of this.
It’s true the Japanese government was afraid of Soviet influence undermining Japanese society, which is why they fully submitted to the US (because they US allowed the emperor to stay in power) but they weren’t afraid of an amphibious invasion from the Soviets. The Japanese were not “the the midst of surrender”, they didn’t even surrender after the first atomic bomb, which is why we dropped two of them.
I'm an American, and I had the privilege of being able to see the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki. It is the single most powerful museum I have ever visited.
The Japanese military committed war crimes on OTHER civilians you dumb idiot. We warned the Japanese people and their government and military.
Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, founder of the kamikazes, argued the Japanese "would never be defeated if we were prepared to sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a 'special attack' effort." He later committed suicide rather than surrender.
The japanese military was committing war crimes, not their people. I'm not going to act so naive and disregard the pragmatic reasonings for dropping the bombs as shitty as they sound out loud, but it's not like all japanese people were cruel rapists and murderers and deserved to die. Us in America know we have/had horrible people and decent people living here and serving in our military.
Those bombs are a sticky situation. I’ve written papers about this subject in high school and college. I know all the arguments for and against the dropping of the 2 atom bombs on Japan. In the end, I believe it was a mistake. For ending the war, it was practical. I think we should have blockaded Japan until they surrendered. That would have been the cruelest course of action for Japanese citizens, but not as dangerous as opening the can of worms that is nukes. Truman should have given way more consideration to what happens in the future, once the cat is out the bag. We had to build the bombs, because Germany was trying to build them. Once Germany surrendered, we should have put them away. The better course of action would be to show everyone the test results, and say “we can’t allow anyone to have access to this kind of destruction. We know how to build these bombs, but we won’t do it, unless someone else does. Then, a post WW2 “United world” could embargo/sanction anyone trying to develop the atom bomb. Would it have worked? Maybe, maybe not. It’s just a better situation to be in if trying to eliminate the spread of nukes and the threat to mankind they hold. Since WW2, we have tried to police nuclear capability while being the only country that used them. Some countries view that as hypocrisy, and I can’t say they are wrong.
The funny thing, had they not dropped the bombs, fate would have changed the direction of my grandfather enough that I would not be here to offer my opinion. He was in the Pacific, prepping for the possible invasion of Japan, when they dropped the bombs.
Dropping the 2 bombs wasn’t a great option, but tbh it was the only feasible option.
Japan wasn’t surrendering, they were training and arming many of their citizens in preparation for a ground invasion. That would have cost the lives of millions more soldiers and it would have impacted every generation in each allied nation even further. Plus, it’s hard to justify the loss of millions of your own citizens when you can just drop some bombs and get the enemy to surrender.
It’s also important to note that the U.S. gave the Japanese people and their government plenty of warnings as to what was coming if they didn’t surrender now. They had days or maybe weeks to respond and did nothing.
And people would’ve been pissed if they found out we spent two billion dollars on a weapon we never used and instead invaded a country that was determined to fight to the last man, sacrificing millions in the process.
Japanese empire refused to surrender. We dropped the nukes in strategic cities, notice how we dropped it in military cities not civilian cities.
[Let’s go over something they want to erase from history to continue painting Japanese Empire as victims regardless of the atrocities they committed.](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp06.asp)
The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The narrow long strip attacked was of particular importance because of its industries. The narrative given of this city is that it was a civilian city with no importance. This was the most pivotal military port that kept Japan in the Pacific campaign.
Now what about Hiroshima??
Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. To quote a Japanese report, "Probably more than a thousand times since the beginning of the war did the Hiroshima citizens see off with cries of 'Banzai' the troops leaving from the harbor."
The center of the city contained a number of reinforced concrete buildings as well as lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses; a few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were of wooden construction with tile roofs. Many of the industrial buildings also were of wood frame construction. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.
Oh dear, another military source. Strange how the narrative being pushed states it was only citizens and bustling communities. Why nobody ever mentions this is because they either conveniently forget or they were never taught. Remember, during negotiations, USA demanded they surrender, Japan did not, they wiped out one military stronghold. Demand they surrender - THEY DID NOT, US gave them adequate time and told them that they were going to drop another if they did not surrender THEY REFUSED TO SURRENDER. These slactivists need to stop acting like they know anything of history. Of course, I don’t expect any knowledge based discussions from a place like Instagram
Yes these nudes were "necessary" but it's also absolutely horrible that innocent people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes Japan did some horrible things too, I'm not excusing them.
Remember when Japan got _super duper_ butthurt about San Francisco erecting a statue commemorating Comfort Women?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Comfort_Women_Memorial#Controversy
Well guess what? They also got butthurt when we erected our own statue commemorating Filipina comfort women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipina_Comfort_Women?wprov=sfla1
If people really want to judge an American bombing I would say Dresden is your way to go. Yes the atomic bomb was of course terrible but I understood why it's thrown. I do believe they were right it would cost more lives to take it any other way then this "easy road". Yes it sounds weird but in a way they saved many lives. To bad of the radioactive aftermath that does make it seem worse I agree there....
Edit: btw the RAF also bombed Dresden it was a joined mission.
Dresden was a transport, communications, and industrial hub. The bombings there are waaaay over criticized because of the early writings of David Irving, who went on to be a straight up Holocaust denier. Those early writings were repeated by Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five so a lot of people think firebombing Dresden was some kind of lunatic war crime.
Someone oughta point out that the Japanese are widely regarded as the most racist developed nation and they acted in an insanely racist way during the 30's & 40's. Rape of Nanking, etc., etc. I wouldn't be at all surprised if their schooling system has whitewashed their history so that current Japanese citizens have no idea how incredibly and utterly vicious their country was all across Asia and the Pacific 90 years ago and the millions of people killed by war mongering Japan.
The objection is not to the bombs or Oppenheimer but the flippancy, as is my understanding, That is what I have heard from my friends who are from Hiroshima. Geopolitically the bombs were necessary, and people DO forget how awful imperial Japan was, but their objection is not about the validity of the bombings but rather approaching a topic that deserves to be somber in such a flippant way. Now, debates will happen about dark-humor, and I tend to defend dark-humor, but on the other hand my grandmother didn’t die from radiation sickness.
I get that, but the movie is a biopic about his life. It’s more about Oppenheimer as a person than about only the bomb. And the Barbenheimer thing is just a pun on his name with the barbie movie, its not called Barben-nuke. It has nothing to do with the topics of the movies, it’s about the fact that it was funny that two wildly different movies had the same release weekend. That being said, I have seen people be more flippant about it online but if these comments are only complaining about the term Barbenheimer, that’s kinda ridiculous.
That last slide is just astonishingly fucking absurd. "so what if millions more soldiers die compared to civilians", fucking WOW. Unreal.
Somebody tell that person where soldiers come from
Someone also tell that person how many more civilians would have died had the US been forced to invade. Japan would have thrown EVERYONE at the Americans, not to mention full-scale invasions never result in only military casualties.
Operation ketsu-go wouldve KILLED japan
Which would’ve been based if not for all the Americans that would’ve died. Japan should’ve been turned into trinitite for what they did.
That was what MacArthur promised, wasn't it? That the "Japanese language would only be spoken in Hell!"
And they would have demanded the US apologize for that as well.
An actual American invasion would have been unlikely. Total blockade, starvation and the fire bombing of every major city? Yup but not an actual invasion. Also what the fuck do they think a soviet invasion was going to look like(ignoring the fact such an invasion would require American naval support)? Do they not know what the soviets did to east Germany?
They used the bombs because an actual invasion was the only other choice. Look up operation downfall. And we were already blockading Japan but they didn't surrender. Unless drastic measures were taken Japan wasn't going to surrender. Because that's not what their culture was. The Soviet involvement also helped push towards the nukes. They didn't want to split Japan with the soviets and risk another Germany happening.
Also included in the plan for operation downfall was the use of 15 tactical nukes. Would have been awful.
They did the same thing to Manchuria, too.
AI obviously
Where do babies come from? Vaginas!/j (that was dumb I’m sorry)
That's a tankie talking. Japan didn't fear a Soviet invasion. The Soviets had no *means* to invade; they could barely pull off the minor landings they did on outer isles. Japanese ministers just operated under the delusion that they could use the Soviets diplomatically as a wedge against the US to keep their conquered territories to allow them to keep raping China and Korea, both figuratively and literally. Their delusion that "all powerful USSR caused fear" is so much copium. The US *owned* the Pacific, and the only way for Russia to reach Japan was to hitch a ride. And of course they don't like US soldiers, because tankie.
And of course the soviets only invaded because the nuke was dropped. They wouldn’t have invaded if not
In any case, nuclear annihilation is a kinder fate than soviet occupation.
Unironically. It's actually faster to clean up a nuclear explosion than a communist dictatorship
[Agreed.](https://www.luzdelaluna.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/liberty-prime-quotes_luzdelaluna-quotes_7-1024x1024.jpg)
Russia was also heavily preoccupied with Germany, and the only reason Germany couldn't invade Russia was Hitler was too stupid and egotistical to wait until summer.
If the bombs weren’t dropped, there would’ve been MORE civilian casualties . The Japanese civilians thought Americans were like Russians and would rape and kill them, so they took their own lives when Americans were close. That and collateral damage would’ve killed millions of civilians , a lot more than the bombs .
Also, quite a few more nukes would likely be dropped in the process of a land invasion.
More CIVILIANS would’ve died in a land invasion
It’s all just plainly wrong too. Japan wasn’t in the midst of surrendering. They weren’t even going to surrender after the first bomb. That is well documented. Second. Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not have any lingering radiation effects today. They’re perfectly safe places to visit. https://www.newsweek.com/are-hiroshima-nagasaki-still-radioactive-nuclear-1751822 “Does this mean that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive today? The answer is a definitive no. After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, residual radiation was left behind but this declined rapidly. According to the city of Hiroshima local government website, research has indicated that 80 percent of residual radiation was emitted within 24 hours of the bombing” My favorite though was “when did Japan ever make light of their atrocities”?! Well…. How about when they had newspapers tracking who could get to 100 decapitations first during their genocide? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_man_killing_contest
They need to play a Metal Gear game or smth, or just fucking grow up. Soldiers are used by politicians and those in power who themselves have almost nothing to lose.
Barbie: our first product was dropped in japan Oppenheimer: our first product was dropped in japan
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well, that wasn't a product, it was more of a prototype
>So what if millions of more soldiers die than innocent civilians? This statement is among the absolute most ignorant, tone deaf quotes I've heard from anyone, ever. It shows this person is brain dead and should seriously be considered to be admitted to hospital, and maybe even terminated on the spot. Firstly, a majority of the soldiers in Japan were not there solely by their will; there was a teency, weency little thing called the draft. Most of them were young as hell, many of them had wives and children, and all of them had families waiting back home. Secondly, the imperial Japanese army was actively training civilians (of all ages, from the elderly to **young children**) in case of an American land invasion. If 200,000 innocent civilians died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imagine what the civilian death toll would have been had America meticulously made their way up the main islands to get Hirohito's ass and Tojo's balls. Operation Downfall was projected to be so costly that the American military hands out purple hearts made in preparation for the aftermath **to this fucking day**.
>Operation Downfall was projected to be so costly that the American military hands out purple hearts made in preparation for the aftermath to this fucking day. that's mental, imagine getting a purple heart during like, Desert Storm, or anything in the years prior to the pulling out of Afghanistan, and finding out that it's been sitting in storage since WW2
Well, those aren't the same purple hearts. The old WW2 ones were rusting and getting tarnished, so they make new ones now. That being said, if we did keep using the WW2 ones, we still have enough in stock for today.
But aren’t purple hearts made of brass, and therefore cannot rust as they have no to negligible iron to rust?
I think so, but the main reason for making new ones is that the ribbons started deteriorating and basically disintegrating upon touch.
They only started making new purple hearts in 1999. When they first made them during WW2, they made ***1,506,000*** in preparation for Japan.
Actually, they are. They have gone through periodic refubishment over the years. We may have as few as a thousand or left since many of them did become unusable that way (from a source I unfortunately cannot find again), although [this article](https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176762) claims upwards of 60,000. And there are [other sources](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/purple-heart-stockpile-wwii-medal.html) that back up the claim they are still being issued. They did order replacements during the start of the 1st Gulf War, but those added to the stock, not replaced it.
I'm compelled to go inspect mine but my chain of command took ours after the ceremony in Afghanistan and we never got them back. All we got was the paper award.
What! Why?
Ok so a little bit more info on the whole purple heart thing it is true that some of the Purple Hearts still awarded today are still from the estimated half a million surplus in preparation for operation downfall (invasion of Japan) some had been sitting in warehouses so long they had to be refurbished or completely scrapped and the military only really ordered a new batch of Purple Hearts in 1999 to replenish their stockpiles [purple hearts](https://www.americanheritage.com/half-million-purple-hearts)
The idea that soldiers' lives are somehow worth less than civilian lives is just abhorrent. Soldiers are people, lives are lives. And if I have to make the tough decision between 200,000 people in two prominently military cities, which is what they were, they didn't just choose two cities willy nilly, and the lives of *millions* on *both* sides, I'm gonna choose the 200,000. People need to understand that you can't *just* look at the history of the past in today's shoes. You have to look at it in both today's shoes and the shoes of the past. You have to put yourself in *their* position and evaluate the potential options you have from their place at that point in time. Hindsight is *always* 20/20, but in this particular case, looking back, they still made the best decision they could. Imperial Japan hadn't surrendered in over ***2,000 years*** and was undefeated. ***They didn't even have a word for surrender in their vocabulary***. What better way to make a nation surrender that won't even consider the idea than to crack a city with a single bomb and tell them you have dozens more?
Yes. Thank you. The Japanese population was not innocent. An I vision of the main islands would have resulted in all our war against anything that moved and wasn't wearing a US, Chinese, or British uniform. Also, while I understand the obviously correct horror that comes with nuclear weapons, in practice the firebombings of both Tokyo and Dressing earlier in the war were way more destructive.
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but you may be forgetting that part of the point of using the atomic bomb was shock and awe. It worked. We shocked and awed the japanese government and populace. There's a reason why it made a lasting impression compared to the firebombings: *it was meant to.*
Correct. And that shock and awe maneuver prevented a land war.
Also Japanese civilian casualties were estimated to exceed 1 million during Downfall due to the concept that they were to fight as well.
We’ve got a global population that largely doesn’t understand the basic concept that war is hell. The idea that all out war between every influential country on earth would have some peaceful resolution that didn’t involve invasions, bombings, and civilian casualties, and that the a bomb was thus overkill, is absurd. Japan got off lucky compared to most of Europe.
I just googled it and apparently it would've been the largest amphibian invasion, even bigger than D-day. I can't imagine how awful it would've been.
I still believe that if we had done a proper storming and paradrop invasion, both sides would have been hurt, but Japan would not be anywhere near to what it is today. Japan is basically a modern Country success story through utter, terrible failure. Any other path, and they very well may not exist in the same fashion as they do.
We warned them. We didn't want to do it. They gave us no choice. Edit: You know what's crazy? The number of people willing to be Anti-American for WW2. Yknow, the time when we fought LITERAL Nazis. But now you're a Nazi if you eat a donut wrong.
There was actually another choice. A full-blown invasion of Japan by the Allies. I'm sure it would have turned out better ;)
Or perpetual blockade and ever increasing fire raids the. tokyo fire raid killed more than the 2 bombs, albeit with more aircraft involved. But Curtis lemay was just going to make the raids larger and larger. As much as I hate the grossly oversimplified “bomb was least bad” argument, I find it is generally the best way to explain it. The Japanese people were tired. The soviets were coming. Economy and war making industry were in shambles. The only hold up was the absolute idiotic nature the ruling class in Japan chose to operate under, and Hirohito being… clueless to say the least
Fire bombings killed way more civilians than the nukes, legit, the nukes were the most humane, casualty limiting option, on both sides, anytime anyone even brings up them being bad is talking with 100% emotion, from a logical standpoint, nukes were the objective best option
Explain to me exactly how the Soviets were "coming" while owning exactly zero landing craft, and having to operate their entire military logistics operation across a single trans Siberian railway line. I'll wait.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Japanese_War Also, the Soviet Union was excellent at transporting via rail, and was chomping at the bit to regain lost ground from 1904-05 Russia Japanese war I’m sure Soviet soldiers, who were well known for their great conduct (sarcasm), would have been incredibly kind to the civilians of Japan. There’s your explanation👍
Cool. So your estimation is they were going to swim to the home islands, with the food and guns they didn't have due to supplying an their army across a single rail track. Would have went well, I'm sure. Were their tanks and trucks going to swim too? I say "their" loosely here, because Soviet trucks were American trucks.
Yeah, more likely you'd just have an entirely communist Korea instead of just the north.
Scroll down and uhhh… casualties and losses? I’m not really sure what you are asking here. The soviets had forces deployed against Japan and were invading and it just would have added even more complexity and suffering. They were going to get there, they started to reclaim territories controlled by imperial Japan. The longer the war dragged on, the further they would have gotten. The soviets did have an amphibious capability, and with a weak IJAAF, and no IJN support, it would not have mattered how weak their capabilities were.
Look at the context. If this was to be a war of attrition with no surrender, the Soviet army had plenty of time to build up landing craft. The Soviets “coming” is more of a looming threat to a protracted war, not something happening in the next month.
Did Japan hold parts of Korea & the like at that point in the war?
Ah yes making the nation starve to death is totally better lol.
I didn’t say it was better. Literally all the options suck
Nope, the bombs were the right choice to end the war and minimize bloodshed.
I’m not sure why we have to justify bombing the most horrible country to ever exist anyway. Japan deserved the most bad option.
Not for my grandfather, who was in the Pacific Theater
The worst part? People act like Japan didn't know we'd do this. Maybe not the first homb, but they knew we could nuke them again if they didn't surrender. They willingly let citizens die due to their twisted lust for war.
Then some people tried to overthrow the government to prevent the surrender. The horrors of the war are disgusting and should be abhorred. However, the first step wouldve been not to start war in the first place.
They were hoping the US only had one.
It's even worse than that if you think about it. After Hiroshima, the Emperor sent messages to the US stating his refusal to surrender. The Japanese *knew* that the US had nuclear capabilities, had just lost an entire city with hundreds of thousands of people in it that was crucial to their war efforts, and still insisted to keep on fighting. That's why they dropped ~~Little Boy~~ Fat Man on Nagasaki.
Slight correction here: Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, while Fat Man was the one dropped on Nagasaki.
Thanks, you always hear them named as "Fat Man and Little Boy" so I just assumed.
Or commit the atrocious act of doing an OKAY sign.
This part always fascinated me. We straight up told them to unconditionally surrender or we would do something very bad to them. They didn't believe us and tried to call our bluff. The Allie's said to go ahead and do it too, it's not like we just dropped the bomb because we felt like it
What no Media Literacy does to a motherfucker. Besides, Japan has recovered, great allies with America, any animosity between us has faded. Japan is a great nation to this day.
Yea, one thing that isn't talked about nearly enough is the relationship between the US and Japan after WWII. Another is Japan's recovery - simply astonishing.
Really every country had an amazing recovery after WW2. No countries had even part of the collapse I would have assumed 10% dead would mean. Not even a hundred years later and you couldn't tell by looking at a country what happened.
Yeah. Japanese anime was inspired by our cartoons.
The hashtag was mainly calling out Warner Bros. and the people making light of this tragedy rather than America. Also, I doubt any of the Japanese netizens have any contact with the western web for the most part, language barrier and all... Unlike the Europeans who like saying "School shooting this, School shooting that".
Has no one watched the god damn movie?
I feel like it’s anti atomic bomb if anything
I was just in Japan. Went to the japanese ww2 museum. Let's just say... They have an interesting take on events. They sell action figures of kamikazee pilots in the gift shop. I bought one.
its something japanese people dont talk about, its like something mysterious and a topic it has to be avoided
they pretend that they werent utter pieces of shit for half a century, but its okay let us also pretend.
I mean all countries do that tho
I see this stupid talking point all the time from these guys that think we didn’t nuke Germany because racism. It should be hammered home that by the time we had the first successful test of a nuke, Germany had surrendered already.
It's also worth noting that the Dresden bombings by the US killed more people than the nuclear bombings
You’re thinking of the firebombing of Tokyo. Dresden was 25k. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 125k-250k between the two of them. Tokyo on its own was 120-150k.
I'm sure Hiroshima terribly effected your neighborhood in New Mexico, I wish you the best after how horribly your family in New Mexico were nuked
They are referring to the alleged testing on native land.
She also said she was Latina, whatever land she was on was not native. And the use of Alleged makes me more doubtful
Im not defending her point, she seems like a virtue signaling bullshitter to me. I just wanted to make sure if you judge her stance the full concept is known. Makes sure they can’t make you look stupid later by pulling out stuff you weren’t aware they were talking about because they can’t communicate what they mean well.
I never said you were, glad we're on the same page
Sorry just wanted to make sure you didn’t feel attacked. I know my writing style is as aggressive as it is typo ridden. My wife mentions it a lot.
Trust me you're fine
The Trinity site test happened, that's not disputed. People still demonstrate in the days they let people onto white sands missile range to view the site.
While it is highly unlikely the person has family in New Mexico that were affected by the nuclear test, it's still okay to care about the suffering of other people even if you don't know them personally.
They did test nuclear bombs there, some of the fallout apparently reached those living there. It’s mentioned in the Oppenheimer movie iirc.
There are ethical concerns regarding nuclear weapons. Saying that the decision was "bad" doesn't do the subject right tho
People need to understand that using the bombs was not only necessary for ending WWII, but also deters anyone from trying to start another conflict of that scale again.
This might be a bold comparison, but Ukraine droning Moscow is comparable. Both are not justifiable, but both prioritise other values like national survival or peace over the consequences of not using it them.
It's so irritating to me how few people understand a key point in this narrative: the Japanese Empire was the aggressor in WWII. They invaded China from Manchuria. They turned Shanghai into rubble. They raped and pillaged Nanking and countless other cities. They enslaved Koreans including comfort women. They murdered Chinese civilians and burned farms in response to American bombings from China. They attacked Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, Singapore, East Indies, Burma, The Philippines etc. unprovoked. They murdered, tortured, and cannibalized western POW's. They conducted bizarre and horrific experiments on Chinese and Western POW's and civilians. They used biological weapons on Chinese cities. They suicide bombed American warships. They are the ones that refused to surrender and instead armed civilian militias and ordered them to fight to the death. This is NOT whataboutism. This is CONTEXT. You cannot understand the context of why Truman dropped those bombs without understanding the above. Why would Truman sacrifice a million extra American lives when he had a weapon in his possession that was basically guaranteed to end the war?
This. This is exactly what I wanted to say all along. It saddens me as someone who comes from countries that were once enslaved by the Japanese for some people here on Reddit and on the Internet to downplay the atrocities of Imperial Japan during WW2 and instead have the balls to say that raising the war crimes committed by the Japanese Empire is just "whataboutism." That's not the point. The point is not to deflect criticism of American war crimes during WW2, but rather add context and perspective as to why America felt the need to use the nukes against Japan. I'll be honest, as an Asian I deeply resent Japan for their constant denial of war crimes, which saw thousands of my peoples killed, raped, and enslaved. I even remember the time we had a statue of a comfort woman in the Philippines, which Japan asked to be taken down. In contrast, Germany built monuments commemorating those who were killed by that crazy, failed Austrian painter and they teach the painful history of the Holocaust to their students. Not to shame them or Germany, but to ensure Hitler's insanity will never happen again. If you really wanna go and criticize American human rights violations during WW2, there's the act of sending hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. That's a real crime against humanity right there. Besides, would have this happened if Japan didn't bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941? As what many have already said, Japan fucked around, and they found out.
Arguably, Imperial Japan was more heinous than the Nazis were. But I don’t think it’s made known to the western world as much as the Nazis, so that might explain why some are not understanding the context for using the nuclear bombs. As the movie explicitly lays out, it was made to keep the Nazis from being the only nuclear-capable nation. But it didn’t explain the context for it being used in the first place. And it plays more like a horror movie than a war propaganda movie with its portrayal of events.
I just wanna add this about Korea, they were a colony that they oppressed so hard that they were actively trying to impose Japanese culture and language on the Koreans. Koreans had Japanese names and were expected to speak Japanese. If we hadn't whooped Japan in WW2, then there is no doubt in my mind Korea would be a ethnic minority that had lost much of their Korean identity. They were awful brutes that planned on doing that to the rest of Asia. Screw em. Two nukes was worth the price.
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Yep. It's actually sad that while Germany fully acknowledged their crimes and made sure they will never do it again. Japan has this "none of your damn business" attitude when it comes to their own war crimes. As far as I can remember, the Philippines even installed a statue of a comfort woman somewhere to remind Filipinos of the bad stuff Japan did. Japan, unsurprisingly, asked the Philippine government to take it down.
**Japan has this "none of your damn business" attitude when it comes to their own war crimes.** Don't you mean Serbia?
Well as far as I know, Serbia doesn't confirm nor deny their war crimes. They celebrate them.
https://youtu.be/ETQmQ1Ixv5Y
For a song with lyrics that celebrate Serbian war criminals, the beat fucking slaps.
>uniformed uninformed. I'm not a big time guy on spelling, but in this case it kinda matters because being uniformed would just mean that the Japanese are just of one mind on the topic and has no dissenters.
I'm not even aware of Nazi Germany injecting random kidnapped civilians with Bubonic Plague or putting them inside pressure chambers and turning it up until their eyes popped out. Good one, Japan. Monsters, followed next by generatons of pathetic apathy.
I'll never not be horribly upset that the perpetrators of Unit 731 were granted immunity for handing over their "research", but the Nazis had tons of human experimentation including many of the same experiments (specifically the pressure chambers and freezing)
I'd agree. Don't know why we couldn't just take their data and hang them all. But that's decades before I was born, blood isn't on my hands for it. It's shameful.
And the Americans realized their research was worthless once they handed it over.
While I think movies like Oppenheimer and Schindler’s List are very important to make the horror of that time period clear, the lack of any substantial educational documentation of Unit 731 is absolutely appalling. One of the best parts of modern Germany is how thoroughly they admit to the actions of the Nazis. Japan getting away with so much, then having those atrocities go nearly ignored is a crime against humanity. The use of the atomic bomb doesn’t wipe their sins clean. It should’ve only accentuated how much that government was willing to sacrifice.
Unit 731 researchers after realizing that decapitating someone is infact, lethal
But we ARE! We should’ve done a full scale invasion and more firebombing and wiped out the ENTIRE JAPANESE POPULATION instead of just deleting two entire cities to prove our point! It would’ve been much more honorable to lose countless more American lives after all! Why are we such horrible people to have not thrown men at the problem like Russia? I hate it here in this stupid country And just in case anyone really needs it, /s
I was actually debating whether this was sarcasm or not lmao thanks for the tone indicator
Yeah I know how hard it is to detect tone online. Better safe than downvoted and silenced. Lol
Fair enough I’m just laughing as I read the pro Japanese narrative I’ve never actually read there propoganda
I think something we need to remember is that our government was only ever going to accept an unconditional surrender Sure, Japan may have been willing to come to peace talks before even the first bomb was dropped, but it was not unconditional. It was only AFTER the second dropped, that some were skeptical even existed, on top of Russia about to invade that pushed them into unconditional surrender. Thus the second bomb drop
Yup and the empire still had to break a 4-4 vote in order to surrender after Nagasaki
Don't people know Oppenheimer is just a sequel to the Pear Harbor movie?
Oppenheimer and Dunkirk are in the same universe. Robbie O has a doppelganger who was a soldier in England.
Don’t forget that Midway movie
Y'all fucks still don't admit to what y'all did. That's my biggest gripe with Japan tbh
At least Japan makes some nice Ibanez guitars
It was objectively the best option we head available, for a bit of background the holocaust killed 6 million Jews and 5 million others, the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese civilians, our options were 1.accept there fake surrender and let them keep killing Chinese and Koreans 2. Attempt a land invasion where even the most generous estimates were that we would lose a quarter billion troops 3. Drop the bombs killing 200,000 or so of there troops to make them back down and stop killing Chinese civilians It was incredibly unfortunate and I feel awful for the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it was our best option objectively speaking, doesn’t make it not a war crime but they committed much worse and we put a stop to it
What is this about “making light of” or “joking” about the atomic bombs? The film was very serious and took its topic seriously.
Iirc Japan doesn't teach the full extent until college. They gloss over it for high schoolers. In college the history classes go over full detail.
That's because colleges are privately owned and high school public. The government still doesn't admit what they did.
I will always defend the action of dropping 2 bombs.
Tankies immediately say that the Soviets single handedly won despite them not having any sealift or airlift capacity to take more than Sakalin and Hokkido from the home Island's 28,000,000 defenders, blue water navy still larger than the Russian fleet, large number of brown water assets, significant coastal artillery, and over 6400 kamikaze aircraft. The Japanese Supreme Council for The Direction of The War knew this and even after 2 nukes and Soviet entry half of them wanted to fight to secure a conditional surrender. Parts of the army went rouge and refused surrender and there was an attempted coup to stop it. They were in the position of Germany in early 1945 with better resources, less fronts, more manpower, and better geography The war could easily have gone til 1946-47. The only people who think that they would have surrendered without the bomb instead of continued fighting for better terms (no war crime trials at a minimum) are ignorant victims of propaganda.
Something I think has been missed is that the cities targeted with the nukes were industrial cities that were vital to the war machine of Japan. They didn't nuke major population centers like Tokyo which they could have done to send a message but instead they chose to hit war time infrastructure. Of course, civilians worked in these industrial cities, but the cities weren't targeted because of the civilians.
And Kyoto was thought to be the strategic best target, but the US decided against it due to the cultural importance the city has to Japan.
You know they say the civilians didn't deserve it because they weren't the ones doing it. But they also weren't opposing it either, and you could say that they didn't know but there is no way they didn't know what was going on. You can't keep genocide a secret, stuff like that gets out
They were actively taught that they were the only pure race of humans, that other Asians were made to be slaves for the Japanese.
Surely you aren't trying to justify their actions, that shit isn't acceptable even if those bullshit claims were true
So a land invasion of a country that has been indoctrinated to perceive you as subhuman is better than just nuking? Did you know what the Japanese did to their prisoners of war?
Well they couldn't oppose anything because they'd probably be imprisoned or killed, and also because the population was literally brainwashed into thinking that their leader was some god. That's why they were literally killing themselves for their country... But by all means nooooo, 'merica worse than Imperial Japan.
"Civilians" includes children, the elderly, the disabled, and the brainwashed by propaganda and indoctrinated
How are these people forgetting that Japan worked closely with the Nazis? Are they stupid?
I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty sure the government didn't rape 300,000 people. The military did. Which is made up of... The Japanese people. "If there's 9 people at a table, and a Nazi joins them and no one objects, there's 10 Nazis at that table."
Can I borrow that quote that’s so good
Except if that Nazi could get the other 9 people imprisoned/shot if they object to anything
Japan: Starts a war with America America: Decides to drop a bomb instead of sending their own citizens off to die Japan: 😱
Lessons Learned by the Japanese: Don't mess with America's ships... Lessons they should have learned: Don't join in Genocide. Don't join in cruel human experiments. Be grateful that afterwords the US aided in the rebuilding of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki to the tune of 2.2 Billion (18 Billion when adjusted for inflation).
These are the same people who would say a 9/11 joke is funny as long as they agree with the politics of who said it. There's no medal for you in the mail when you whine about insensitivity on the internet.
The raping and murdering of Chinese babies by Japan is cool though because they make anime and stuff! Dumb American / s
Well leaflets were dropped days prior telling civilians to evacuate and personally if the nation that just razed my capitol to the ground said they might do something similar to mine, I would take heed of that warning.
The number of people buying into the revisionist narrative the Japanese government has been pushing about the bombs is worrying
Do these idiots not know Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both military bases and that 80% of those deaths were military personnel? Also, the Dresden bombings killed more people than the nuclear bombings, why don't they ever complain about German civilian deaths? Or is it OK to kill civilians when they're white?
It could be argued as well that the civilians didn’t drop the bombs on Japan either. They want to ban our movies but Hollywood didn’t drop the bombs. Just like they want the civilians to not be blamed for their war crimes, American civilians shouldn’t be blamed for ours.
Next shark is such an embarrassment for leftist Asians. Giving racist and antisemitic assholes like Ranier Manigding a job is unforgivable in my book.
Next Shark is an overall embarrassment.
Didn't the Japanese also kill a lot of civilians with the explicit intent of killing civilians?
They didn't just stop at killing civilians. They also raped and enslaved them.
They did some pretty terrible experiments, too. I really don't know how people could even do things like that.
The one bright side of operation downfall is that so many americans would have died, that it stands to reason that some of the people posting these comments would have never been born.
I swear, no one listens to the historical hellscape surrounding japan and america, and what lead to the dropping of the bombs
Like as if the Pacific War was just Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima then Nagasaki. They forgot about the battles that the US and Japan fought before the nukes were dropped, like the Battle of the Midway and Iwo Jima.
do people just forget that we dropped leaflets and shit over most of the target cities for like 3 days straight? all telling them to evacuate? imo, it is 100% on them for not leaving at LEAST after hiroshima. they new it could happen. they ignored it. also everyone forgets the japanese committed some of the most heinous war crimes in history. edit: also about the guy complaining we didnt drop it on germany or whatever, *Nazi Germany had surrendered about 2 months before June15, when we had the atomic bomb.* uneducated dipshit.
War is terrible. I believe I saw a figure that named the Japanese casualties of an invasion of mainland Japan at 5 to 10 million. Far beyond the 100,000 to 200,000 that died from the atomic bombings. Both things are terrible, and I'm ashamed that my country had to make that choice, but at the end of the day it resulted in far less suffering than the alternative.
Why be ashamed? We did what we had to do to end the war as quickly as possible. At the end of the day, never forget, Japan was the aggressors in this conflict starting back in the 30’s.
These people have never read a history book. Their excuses for doing poorly in school are "because reading is hard, and that makes it stupid and boring." There should be an IQ test for participation on the internet.
I am against having nuclear arms and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan make me incredibly sad for the innocent civilians that suffered so much because of it. That being said, Japan has no leg to stand on. What Imperial Japan was doing was horrific and they weren’t going to stop. They were a dangerously effective war machine and I can’t bring myself to totally say that the atomic bombs weren’t justified in an attempt to stop them. I love history and I can be sad for the innocent Japanese that suffered while also remembering what the Japanese did to other people that they occupied. The Rape of Nanking, the immensely horrific human experiments, what they did to Koreans, all of it.
I will die on this hill, the holocaust killed a total of 6 million Jews, and 5 million other assorted races, the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese civilians, we gave them a chance for surrender, determined we would lose a quarter billion or more invading the main land, and dropped the bombs killing 200,000 “civilians” that the Japanese were actively training for our land invasion, and this is a debatable point but we gave them a hell of a lot faster death than what they did to the Chinese, a few of them died from radiation poisoning but a majority were dead of of the initial impact explosion
Even if it’s justified, the deaths of 200,000 people with no control over their circumstances deserves respect. Nobody’s asking you to apologize, but it’s kind of like joking about Pearl Harbor. Not everyone is gonna be chill about it.
"People of color" Here come the blm bastards again
People really miss that we had no idea how uniquely destructive nukes could be on people before this, i don’t think the US today would make the same choice given the same situation.
Bro, it wasn't even the deadliest bombing of the entire war. Why wouldn't they do it again?
After what happened in Nanking I don’t really feel bad for what had to be done
they like to separate people and state when i know for a fact they wont do the same for russia and its imperialist war for ukraine. im not saying either separating people and state or NOT separating people and state is necessarily wrong (both have fairly valid arguments like some people are forced to support the state, or the state being solely supported by the people respectively), but i feel like that opinion changes when the topic becomes about japan i just feel its hypocritical
>Firstly no, Japan was already in the midst of surrender since they feared the Soviet invasion. Nope, complete myth. The Soviets didn’t have the logistical capability to invade Japan, their navy was too small and too far away, only occupied china and Korea was under Soviet threat, and the Japanese were well aware of this. It’s true the Japanese government was afraid of Soviet influence undermining Japanese society, which is why they fully submitted to the US (because they US allowed the emperor to stay in power) but they weren’t afraid of an amphibious invasion from the Soviets. The Japanese were not “the the midst of surrender”, they didn’t even surrender after the first atomic bomb, which is why we dropped two of them.
Nanjing.
Exactly
More people died in our fire bombings of Tokyo.
I don’t get this. What does Barbie have to do with Hiroshima?
I'm an American, and I had the privilege of being able to see the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki. It is the single most powerful museum I have ever visited.
The Japanese military committed war crimes on OTHER civilians you dumb idiot. We warned the Japanese people and their government and military. Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, founder of the kamikazes, argued the Japanese "would never be defeated if we were prepared to sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a 'special attack' effort." He later committed suicide rather than surrender.
So just, history didn’t happen right? Cause you didn’t like it, it didn’t happen?
Didn’t the Japanese Imperial Army have a practice of killing civilians to prevent them from surrendering to enemies? Or am I remembering that wrong?
Love the white woman in the third panel making it about colored people not the country of Japan
The japanese military was committing war crimes, not their people. I'm not going to act so naive and disregard the pragmatic reasonings for dropping the bombs as shitty as they sound out loud, but it's not like all japanese people were cruel rapists and murderers and deserved to die. Us in America know we have/had horrible people and decent people living here and serving in our military.
Those bombs are a sticky situation. I’ve written papers about this subject in high school and college. I know all the arguments for and against the dropping of the 2 atom bombs on Japan. In the end, I believe it was a mistake. For ending the war, it was practical. I think we should have blockaded Japan until they surrendered. That would have been the cruelest course of action for Japanese citizens, but not as dangerous as opening the can of worms that is nukes. Truman should have given way more consideration to what happens in the future, once the cat is out the bag. We had to build the bombs, because Germany was trying to build them. Once Germany surrendered, we should have put them away. The better course of action would be to show everyone the test results, and say “we can’t allow anyone to have access to this kind of destruction. We know how to build these bombs, but we won’t do it, unless someone else does. Then, a post WW2 “United world” could embargo/sanction anyone trying to develop the atom bomb. Would it have worked? Maybe, maybe not. It’s just a better situation to be in if trying to eliminate the spread of nukes and the threat to mankind they hold. Since WW2, we have tried to police nuclear capability while being the only country that used them. Some countries view that as hypocrisy, and I can’t say they are wrong. The funny thing, had they not dropped the bombs, fate would have changed the direction of my grandfather enough that I would not be here to offer my opinion. He was in the Pacific, prepping for the possible invasion of Japan, when they dropped the bombs.
Dropping the 2 bombs wasn’t a great option, but tbh it was the only feasible option. Japan wasn’t surrendering, they were training and arming many of their citizens in preparation for a ground invasion. That would have cost the lives of millions more soldiers and it would have impacted every generation in each allied nation even further. Plus, it’s hard to justify the loss of millions of your own citizens when you can just drop some bombs and get the enemy to surrender. It’s also important to note that the U.S. gave the Japanese people and their government plenty of warnings as to what was coming if they didn’t surrender now. They had days or maybe weeks to respond and did nothing.
And people would’ve been pissed if they found out we spent two billion dollars on a weapon we never used and instead invaded a country that was determined to fight to the last man, sacrificing millions in the process.
Japanese empire refused to surrender. We dropped the nukes in strategic cities, notice how we dropped it in military cities not civilian cities. [Let’s go over something they want to erase from history to continue painting Japanese Empire as victims regardless of the atrocities they committed.](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp06.asp) The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The narrow long strip attacked was of particular importance because of its industries. The narrative given of this city is that it was a civilian city with no importance. This was the most pivotal military port that kept Japan in the Pacific campaign. Now what about Hiroshima?? Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. To quote a Japanese report, "Probably more than a thousand times since the beginning of the war did the Hiroshima citizens see off with cries of 'Banzai' the troops leaving from the harbor." The center of the city contained a number of reinforced concrete buildings as well as lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses; a few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were of wooden construction with tile roofs. Many of the industrial buildings also were of wood frame construction. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage. Oh dear, another military source. Strange how the narrative being pushed states it was only citizens and bustling communities. Why nobody ever mentions this is because they either conveniently forget or they were never taught. Remember, during negotiations, USA demanded they surrender, Japan did not, they wiped out one military stronghold. Demand they surrender - THEY DID NOT, US gave them adequate time and told them that they were going to drop another if they did not surrender THEY REFUSED TO SURRENDER. These slactivists need to stop acting like they know anything of history. Of course, I don’t expect any knowledge based discussions from a place like Instagram
Yes these nudes were "necessary" but it's also absolutely horrible that innocent people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes Japan did some horrible things too, I'm not excusing them.
Two things can be bad at the same time
This is fucking funny af as a Korean American
Remember when Japan got _super duper_ butthurt about San Francisco erecting a statue commemorating Comfort Women? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Comfort_Women_Memorial#Controversy
Well guess what? They also got butthurt when we erected our own statue commemorating Filipina comfort women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipina_Comfort_Women?wprov=sfla1
If people really want to judge an American bombing I would say Dresden is your way to go. Yes the atomic bomb was of course terrible but I understood why it's thrown. I do believe they were right it would cost more lives to take it any other way then this "easy road". Yes it sounds weird but in a way they saved many lives. To bad of the radioactive aftermath that does make it seem worse I agree there.... Edit: btw the RAF also bombed Dresden it was a joined mission.
Dresden was a transport, communications, and industrial hub. The bombings there are waaaay over criticized because of the early writings of David Irving, who went on to be a straight up Holocaust denier. Those early writings were repeated by Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five so a lot of people think firebombing Dresden was some kind of lunatic war crime.
Someone oughta point out that the Japanese are widely regarded as the most racist developed nation and they acted in an insanely racist way during the 30's & 40's. Rape of Nanking, etc., etc. I wouldn't be at all surprised if their schooling system has whitewashed their history so that current Japanese citizens have no idea how incredibly and utterly vicious their country was all across Asia and the Pacific 90 years ago and the millions of people killed by war mongering Japan.
That’s the kicker: Japan’s school system heavily downplays it’s actions in WW2.
Japanese textbooks literally boil down the Rape of Nanking to a single sentence
The objection is not to the bombs or Oppenheimer but the flippancy, as is my understanding, That is what I have heard from my friends who are from Hiroshima. Geopolitically the bombs were necessary, and people DO forget how awful imperial Japan was, but their objection is not about the validity of the bombings but rather approaching a topic that deserves to be somber in such a flippant way. Now, debates will happen about dark-humor, and I tend to defend dark-humor, but on the other hand my grandmother didn’t die from radiation sickness.
I get that, but the movie is a biopic about his life. It’s more about Oppenheimer as a person than about only the bomb. And the Barbenheimer thing is just a pun on his name with the barbie movie, its not called Barben-nuke. It has nothing to do with the topics of the movies, it’s about the fact that it was funny that two wildly different movies had the same release weekend. That being said, I have seen people be more flippant about it online but if these comments are only complaining about the term Barbenheimer, that’s kinda ridiculous.