Comment by sandworm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm | Hacker News Reader

Lol. This topic is just about the most sensitive things I can imagine. The concept that America "won" both the pacific and European wars is an integral part of American identity. Shortly after the war, with the rise of the cold war, US students were brought up on the one narrative. Any suggestion that the Soviets were a driving force in ending the war forces them to confront deeply held beliefs regarding the use of force and violence generally.

Another aspect not covered in the OP is the efficiency of US nukes. Much/most of the damage done was not from the bombs. If you measure damage through the heat energy released, most came from the burning of the cities rather from the fission in the bomb itself. The firebombing of a city releases as much energy as a nuclear explosion, doing a comparable amount of damage. At the time, a firebombing raid required fewer resources than a nuke. So, from an energy standpoint, the nukes were not an economical means of destroying Japanese cities.

Why then were they used? Why were they used in the pacific and not in europe? (Insert massive screaming rants here.)

The trinity test was in july 1945, two months after the surrender of Germany.

We don't know whether atomic bombs would have been used on, say, Berlin or the Ruhr area (maybe even tactically, to speed up the allied advance in the west), but I think the USA would have used one, if only to send a message to the soviets.

I have heard discussion that those in control were worried about dropping a nuke over Germany for fear that, should it not explode, it would wind up in the hands of enemy scientists. Japan was not considered capable of repaiting and turning around such a device. Some artillery and anti-aircraft shells during WWII were not permitted to be used over land for similar reasons.

The timelines, the actual dates that the bombs became available, are a little secondary imho as this was a multi-year developmental program. I still doubt they would have dropped a bomb on germany for a variety of reasons both technological and sociological.

That's what they where designed for and if d day had stalled they would have been used in the rhur.

There is also strong evidence that Stalin wanted to get to berlin first to grab some of the German nuclear materiel in Berlin

They were used on Japan and not Germany because they barely were okayed for use a few weeks prior to their detonation over enemy territory. The Germans had no compunction about dropping them on us had they had a working one so I don't think we would have had any issue deploying one over Germany --just like we had little issue firebombing Dresden. At the time saw both Japan and Germany as mortal enemies and would have used any resource at hand to defeat them militarily.

Actually, I think there is a big open issue about the difference between the US policy on strategic bombing in Japan and against Germany.

US bombing in Germany was designed to specifically attack industry. They flew during daytime, despite that leading to much higher causalities among their crews, and used bomb targets.

It was the UK that firebombed Dresden during night without bothering to aim at specific targets. The British always flew night raids and just aimed to cause carnage.

American policy on the Western campaign didn't target civilians. They used precision bombing (what it was called at the time, it wasn't very precise) to target real targets.

Yet, the policy against Japan ended up much different. At the beginning precision bombing was attempted. But by 1945 they started to resort to firebombing entire cities.

I wonder if there was a racial aspect to it. A lot of Americans consider themselves ethnically German.

I don't think there was a racial aspect in the sense that Germans were seen as more 'us'. We demonized both Germans and Japanese pretty similarly. There were Americans of German ancestry who changed their surnames to avoid discrimination and unpleasantness from other non German whites. I think we started firebombing Japan when it became difficult to tell industry apart from the general pop as they moved factories into non industrial areas

Still, I think, that Japan directly attacked the US at Pearl Harbor made a big difference. Germany was also seen as having a bad regime with war criminals, but they started the war with the US not with such a carnage. So, I think politicians and parts of the US people in this time saw Japan as the worse "beast".

Yet no German-Americans were herded in concenration camps, unlike what the American government did to all Japanese-Americans. Why was that?

Certainly we had people who thought that Japanese were more apt to side with our foe due to their being Japanese and being easy to tell apart. However as it pertains bombing, which is the discussion here, we were indiscriminate towards both. We did try to steer clear from cultural targets such as avoiding Kyoto. We did not have the same view on Dresden as it had more strategic importance. And people forget we had restrictions on Germans in the country and interned a few thousand as well though not to the extent we did Japanese. Italians on the other hand we didn't take seriously --not even sure we labeled them enemy aliens

Kyoto was the traditional seat of Imperial power. Tokyo, called Edo back in the days the seat of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a military dictatorship, is the national capital because of that. A whole lot of the action that overthrew the Shogunate happened in Kyoto, so sparing it was in part to encourage the Emperor---in a position that for a very long time had little or no real power---to do exactly what he did then. If he'd tried it earlier, he would have been killed and replaced with a more pliable one. As others have noted, the final surrender was a rather close run thing....

Hard to believe it was anything but European vs Asian. Not right, but it was war. And the British didn't do it like we did; and the British leaked secrets like a sieve. There was a highly-placed Japanese in UK govt, who sent everything on his desk back to Japan. So war is heck.

That's just rubbish. US bombing missions were not in any way targetted strikes compared to the UK's night raids. Have a look at what was achieved by the British pathfinder system guiding first Mosquitos then specialist heavy bombers to target mark the main raids.

The USAAF conducted firebombing of German cities, notably Hamburg.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com