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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Winning the war is obviously the biggest factor in terms of who goes to the gallows.

But there's a difference between loss of life in combat versus deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation or of prisoners who are in your care. It's not about who has the highest scorecard of death and depravity.

Ask the same question about incendiary bombing, which happened throughout the war. The B-29s dropping incendiaries on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic attacks. Are those pilots war criminals? Are the artillerymen who leveled towns and villages full of people war criminals? Based on the "total war" approach embraced in WW2, they were not.

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Yeah, I only meant the atomic bombs, which was quite clearly "deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation" as far as I can tell.

I mean, it was essentially, "We have unlimited capacity to randomly murder 100,000 of your civilians at once, we've demonstrated it twice now, so submit to our authority." Well, they did.

Well, what you can tell is wrong. The atomic bombs were horrific in their destructions and death toll, but not really any more than the conventional bombings. Even the Japanese didn't think much of Hiroshima based on that alone (they had gotten used to cities getting wiped out) and it took Nagasaki to make clear that this was really a game-changer.

Here's an interesting article that stipulates Nagasaki really didn't add anything to the equation (and to your original point the Japanese were already used to this) - http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...

Dresden Bombings, Bombing of London, Tokyo Fire Bombings, Rape of Nanjing, take your pick, WWII was Total War in the closest sense of the Clausewitzian term, it was about breaking the will of a government (sometimes) and definitely it's people. The practice of protecting civilians of a foreign nation is really a western one rooted in chivalric code of conduct and to be fair, wasn't expected practice until fairly recently.

Under the military doctrine of the day, the enemy's means of production were legitimate targets. That included industry, transit points, and other things associated with urban areas. The Japanese adopted a similar strategy, especially in China.

FYI I'm not personally advocating that obliterating cities is ok. I find it morally repugnant. I'm Just recounting the generally accepted standard of the time.

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