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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

> "You're not the only one, but most of the people who believe like you are Americans."

Conveniently forgetting about the enormous population of China and the rest of Asia subject to the depredations of the Imperial Japanese Army, who also overwhelmingly approve of the atomic bombings. I have relatives who lived during the war or its aftermath and, needless to say, they do not share your concerns in the slightest.

IMO, it's more accurate to say that the handwringing over the bombings is a small minority of Westerners advocating fringe theories that try to paint Japan as a victim rather than an aggressor.

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No, you're conflating different things.

I'm sure Japan, through their crimes, earned the hatred of many countries in Asia which welcomed the atomic bombings as retribution.

But the narrative I'm mostly arguing against is not that many welcomed the bombings, but the specific American narrative that there was no other way and that they "saved Japanese lives".

If you want to argue the Japanese (civilians and all) deserved it, that's a separate conversation.

Please tell us what other strategy you advocate.

They basically were 2 alternative.

US Army wanted an invasion of main land Japan.

US Navy wanted a longer term blockade that would literally lead to mass starvation and basically transform Japan back the Shogunate period in terms of population.

A good argument can be made that both of these would have lead to far more deaths.

I don't know that those were the only two alternatives.

> Please tell us what other strategy you advocate.

"Tell us": who is "us"? In any case, I'm thankfully not in the situation to decide, nor am I an armchair general, so I'll have to excuse myself from invading or bombing Japan.

To state my position once again: the narrative popular in the US, that the atomic bombings were justified as a terrible necessity and that they actually saved lives ("Japanese lives", like someone else stated) is only popular in the US, and it exists mostly to enable them to retain their sense of being the good guys. Other countries, unburdened by the necessity of always making the US look like the good guys, don't favor this particular narrative.

> who is "us"?

People in the comment section of this forum where we are having an argument about this situation.

> In any case, I'm thankfully not in the situation to decide, nor am I an armchair general, so I'll have to excuse myself from invading or bombing Japan.

Seems like the simple way out.

> is only popular in the US

Its actually popular with everybody who has studied WW2 in detail. I'm European and I watch content by other Europeans who agree with the argument.

In terms of popular opinion, I don't think most nations think about it much at all.

> it exists mostly to enable them to retain their sense of being the good guys

I disagree. You can be the good guy without arguing that it was the better option for Japan.

> Other countries, unburdened by the necessity of always making the US look like the good guys, don't favor this particular narrative.

Its a simple matter of military strategy. Anybody that has studied military history can engaged in those arguments. Ending a war is difficult, and threw-out history we see different how they can end.

Looking at the strategic options at the time and doing the best you can at evaluating the potential casualties will lead you to the conclusion that you don't seem to like.

If you disagree with that assessment, then you have to make an argument for an alternative strategy that would have saved more people.

Argument like that could potentially be made. One might argue for example that going away from unconditional surrender, and trying to make some kind of deal where Japan could keep Korea or something like that could have been made.

But again, you actually have to make that argument if you want to be the a moral critic.

"It's a simple matter", "seems like the simple way out".

Well, if you have it all figured out, why engage with me in conversation?

> Its actually popular with everybody who has studied WW2 in detail

This is false, and an empty assertion. So the people who disagree with you haven't studied WW2 in detail? A variant of the "all non-populist historians agree that [...]".

In Australia, for undergraduate students studying history, this is the most commonly assigned essay topic in World War 2 studies.

Most of the students go into it thinking like you.

Nearly all of them change their mind once they look more deeply at the evidence.

The atomic bombings are a classic case where the popular assumed narrative differs significantly from the facts.

And that’s the reason this is assigned as an essay topic. The idea is to sober up the students a little bit and help them understand that their neat worldviews (USA bad!) are not reflected in the messy reality.

Thanks for your reply. One thing I want to point out, because I saw someone else also ask me this:

> [...] help them understand that their neat worldviews (USA bad!)

I don't know about Australian students, but at least I am not saying "USA bad". I'm describing a particular narrative about the atomic bombings as being fueled by the necessity of Americans to sustain their perception of always being the good guys.

For some reason some people read this and conclude I believe the US were the bad guys.

I obviously believe the atomic bombings were a war crime; but more generally, I do not believe the US were the bad guys in WW2. All moral grays and downright immoral actions committed aside, the US was on the good side of that war, and Japan on the bad side. I hope that clears up that part of my position.

> Well, if you have it all figured out, why engage with me in conversation?

I don't have it figured out. What I am trying to do is explain your policy. I'm trying to get you to commit to an actual viable policy rather then doing moral grandstanding.

> This is false, and an empty assertion. So the people who disagree with you haven't studied WW2 in detail? A variant of the "all non-populist historians agree that [...]".

It reflects my own experience with studying the topic, in media, books, podcast, forums and so on.

And generally the people who disagree refuse to make detailed historical argument or proposing alternative solutions and just relay on moral grandstanding.

You're trying to pull somebody into an argument that they're not interested in. The argument they were making is that approving of something that causes Japanese suffering because it causes Japanese suffering is not the same as approving of something that causes Japanese suffering for its strategic value or necessity to end the war.

You're arguing against a position that the person you're arguing against hasn't taken.

The US had already formed an agreement with Stalin that the USSR would invade Manchuria (despite it's non-aggressin pact with Japan). This plan involved the USSR gaining control of territory they formerly lost to Japan during the Russo-Japanese war. That was the original US plan to end the war, not a ground invasion. When Truman saw the trinity test he decided that he could win the war using nukes without letting the soviets gain anything. Hence the scramble to drop them.

Or they could have offered Japan a conditional surrender rather than insisting on an "unconditional" one and then letting them keep their emporer anyway. Japan was already looking desperately for ways to surrender.

This is incorrect on a number of fronts: 1) The Japanese surrender was unconditional. The emperor's positions as very much at Douglas Macarthurs will. (And this was made clear before the surrender). 2) There was no move to cut the soviets out. Stalin immediately became paranoid (as he often did) and moved up his time frame once it became clear (before Trinity) that the USA would have the bomb soon. 3) Truman never decided any such thing - in fact, he announced ("with glee" according to the reporters present) that Stalin had entered the war. This narrative comes from Hasegawa's book, and it's completely incorrect.

The conditions the Japanese Supreme Council was looking so desperately for were:

1. The form of the Japanese government remains unchanged. (I.e. the Emperor is guaranteed to remain emperor. This was not agreed to, but it did work out that way.)

2. Japan was not to be occupied.

3. Japan would be responsible for demobilizing its own forces.

4. Japan would be responsible for investigations and trials of war crimes.

You comfortable with those?

Clearly there's a lot of depth here to exolore and I can admit to only a casual interest in the topic, but my understanding is that there were different factions within the Japanese leadership who were comfortable with different sets of conditions, and only #1 was a sticking point for everyone.

However, let's assume this is the only deal Japanese leaders would have accepted. Our discomfort about these conditions should be weighed against the discomfort of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids and dropping nuclear bombs on two cities. It's kind of hard to argue, for example, that an overriding concern about war crimes is why you'd have to bomb civilians.

> "Our discomfort about these conditions should be weighed against the discomfort of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids and dropping nuclear bombs on two cities."

Think about the implications of what #1 is and what you're saying. The European theater equivalent would have been to leave Nazi Germany's government intact with Hitler as its head. If that's an acceptable deal to you, well, you're probably not going to find a lot of people to stand with you.

"...the discomfort of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids and dropping nuclear bombs on two cities..."

That decision had been made long before 1945. A pocket timeline of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 (officially) - 1945) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War)

1931 Japanese military manufacture a casus belli (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident) and invade Manchuria, defeating the Chinese and occupying it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasion_of_Manchuria)

1937 Yet another incident reignites the war, leading to the capture of Shanghai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai), the capture of Beijing, and the capture of Nanjing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre): ("Because of the myriad of factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. However, the most sophisticated and credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 cases of rape.").

Some additional info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_usi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Rape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Nanking_Safet...

(I mention those because they make it perfectly clear that the Japanese people knew about the activities of the military in China.)

These activities resulted in an international response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai#Internation...), but nothing resulted until after the Japanese takeover of what was then French Indochina. Then, trade restrictions and an embargo resulted in Japan's attack on the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_o...).

"Some historical estimates of the number of deaths which resulted from Japanese war crimes range from 3 to 14 million through massacre, human experimentation, starvation, and forced labor that was either directly perpetrated or condoned by the Japanese military and government." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes)

Now, I realize you've said you acknowledge Japan's war crimes, and you might even invoke the sunk cost fallacy: those people were already dead. However, there are two points you seem to be missing: the goal of the allies with their "unconditional surrender" terms were the removal of governments that had repeatedly demonstrated that they were militarily aggressive and their replacement with governments that were not (successfully, I might add), and by the scale of Japan's own actions in the war that "discomfort" is a drop in the bucket.

Aggressor want to occupy as much land and resources as possible and kill as much opposition as possible.

Defender want to save people lives and protect status quo.

> But the narrative I'm mostly arguing against is not that many welcomed the bombings, but the specific American narrative that there was no other way and that they "saved Japanese lives".

Yep.

This story comes to mind. >BTS T-shirt: Japanese TV show cancels BTS appearance over atomic bomb shirt

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46147777

In the US educational system you'll learn much more about the atomic bomb than Nanking or anything Japan did. I suspect this is due to China being a Cold War adversary. Chinese intervention in the Korean War makes much more sense when you consider China's security concerns.

No one wants hostile foreign troops on their border. I see parallels in Ukraine. Russia really doesn't want NATO to encircled them. We would have problems with Russian troops stationed in Toronto.

This is still recent history.

I recall a Filipino man telling me his grandfather forbid him from marrying a Japanese woman.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_famine_of_1945

It can be argued that had the war lasted any longer millions would of starved. In fact even if we just blockaded Japan, mass starvation would of killed millions.

The post war Marshall Plan is above and beyond one of the greatest things we've done as a country.

> No one wants hostile foreign troops on their border. I see parallels in Ukraine. Russia really doesn't want NATO to encircled them. We would have problems with Russian troops stationed in Toronto.

Ukraine don't want members of Russian Federation and it allies to encircle Ukraine, so we are going to liberate Belarus and take Kuban back. The only important thing for us is what WE want, isn't?

>Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...

> U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’

> NATO

US ≠ NATO

RF ≠ USSR

Gorbachev ≠ Pukin

That assurance is a fake peddled by Russian propaganda, which goes completely against NATO's open door policy. Around 2000-2003 Russia was in talks about joining NATO ourselves; clearly, no regard to that "assurance" was given.

I'm open to being wrong, can you point me to a source saying it's propaganda.

As far as I've been able to determine, Ukraine wants to join NATO.

I always got the feeling that asians of that generation (at least at the leadership level) understood that the Japanese were just playing by the rules of the game established by the europeans. That's why both sides of the chinese civil war, for instance, were willing to work with the japanese - and why after the communists won, they were happy to work with the japanese to rebuild the economy. It's the same in South Korea - the post-war leadership's relationship to Japan is somewhat complex - consider Syngman Rhee, who was part of the Gapsin coup, or to a more extreme level, Park Chung-hee, or Chiang Kai-shek, both of whom had formative years in Japanese institutions, and were soldiers in the japanese army.

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