You also have to remember, the Axis Japanese were extremely brutal in war. The allies could not afford to think, "maybe they'll turn nice".
War sucks. My dad fought in World War 2. Frontline soldier in Western Europe in Patton’s Third Army. His battalion war book has the names of the dead and many are underlined in red because those are the ones he knew. He was a drunk and abusive and obviously suffered from untreated PTSD.
His division was preparing to transfer to the Pacific when the atomic bombs were dropped. He appreciated that as a result the Japanese surrendered (at least it appeared to be a causal effect from his perspective). Who can possibly calculate the efficacy of the alternatives even in retrospect? It’s easy to criticize after the fact. Are you so certain you’d have decided differently than Curtis LeMay were you in his position?
However, I am challenging the incredibly strong urge people have to absolve those who made the choice of any kind of responsibility for having made it. You will see it even in the responses to this comment. We absolutely refuse to even acknowledge that a choice was, in fact, made to kill all of these innocent civilians.
The person I responded to is struggling to understand how the Japanese reacted to this. But he is paying absolute zero mind to the actions and reactions of those on his own side, who chose to bring this tragedy about.
The very idea of thinking about the acts committed by your own side is strongly, strongly taboo.
They made it earlier in the war. Civilians were the war economy and civilians were legit targets for all nations in war.
Civilians in a total war are just not typical civilians. Everybody in society was mobilized for war.
> The very idea of thinking about the acts committed by your own side is strongly, strongly taboo.
No it isn't. Lots of historians work on that. There are lots of talks about it in places like WW2 History Museum and so on.
That's not what the Geneva Conventions says.
Before there there was Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Those were violated in WW1 on a large scale and no alternative had been put into place.
All these things are good and nice, but the reality is, if disagreeing with these is vital to win a war, literally no nation followed them.
Those kinds of agreements are good attempts in peace time to improve the chance of good outcomes, but in reality, in major global they are just pieces of papers that can not be enforced.
If you want to run around and simply say everybody is evil, then you can do that. But if you actually put yourself in the position of those people and try to make decisions if you want to be critical, explain what and how you would have done things differently.
And what cost would you have been willing to engage in to achieve that moral high ground.
Or do we like to pretend there has, and that's all done now, but still treat the subject as taboo and avoid it?
This is also the case when a murderer is put to death for their crime. The murderer is responsible for the person he killed and his own death; the state who put him to death is not responsible for his murder.
Choices were made. They had consequences.