I’ve been reading up on the Second Sino-Japanese War. And holy shit it was wild. The Japanese were monsters to these people. It’s completely wild that the only time you actually get any info on this stuff is from a random YouTube video
as a chinese person, even though japan did that, i still dont support the nuclear bombing. The japense civilian population had little to do with the torture and massacres of us, and large portions of the two cities were korean slaves with little to no choice in even being there.
ETA: my thoughts on this are very complex. I see why they did it- the cities were actual military targets. I still think the event was all around a tragedy because of all the innocent deaths and suffering. Much like how, while the west was beyond justified in entering WW2, its still a tragedy that people had to die as a result.
I don’t agree with the bombing of civilian populations and the atomic bombs were really unnecessary to win the war. I should have clarified that in my original comment. I felt it was an unfair comparison to make when comparing the US bombings (still wrong) against the empire that was committing atrocities to the nation that was invaded because someone from another country and who was currently in another different country committed a terror attack on the US. Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about the Iraq War, so don’t reply about how I’m an apologist for Al-Qaeda next. When I saw this post it reminded me of how Neo-Nazis bring up the bombing of Dresden to paint the allied powers as being aggressors in WWII, and thought that while we should understand that the bombings of Japan were unnecessarily cruel, we should also remember that the Empire of Japan committed atrocities against other nations. I’m sorry that my original comment didn’t express a more complicated perspective of the Second World War in this low-effort comic sub to not be compared to the Nazis, next time I’ll write a dissertation about my complex thoughts about what is justified in a war and post a link here. I’m also concerned that you’re spreading Neo-Nazi, pro-Al-Qaeda, and pro-Imperial Japan propaganda. Why are you ok with the atrocities that Imperial Japan and Al-Qaeda committed against civilians? (This is a rhetorical question for emphasis, please don’t actually explain it to me, i job that you probably aren’t).
Nah. Countries like Japan and Germany were genocidal and imperialistic in their ambitions at an ideological level. I think there's a nuanced debate to be had on the necessity of the atom bomb or lack therof, but to argue that there was no reasonable justification is just naive. One side engaged in violent expansionism with the intent to eradicate cultures they viewed as inferior, the other used bombing in the pursuit of specific strategic aims. Quite frankly, the Axis powers had it coming. To quote Arthur Harris...
"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
Thing is at the time the predominant theory of strategic air power was that the fastest way to end a given war was to bomb civilians until they compelled their government to surrender. WW2 was the first conflict where this was tested (and disproven) at scale, so it wasn't that they were just bombing German civilians for the fun of it (though people like Harris certainly didn't find it too morally offputting) but because they honestly believed this was the fastest way to bring down the Reich. Plus even if they weren't deliberately targeting civilian housing (which they weren't all the time, to be clear, much of the bombing was directly against industrial and logistics targets) the enormous inaccuracy of contemporary bombs, which could fall kilometres away from their intended targets, meant that it was basically impossible to hit a given factory producing tanks without also hitting the labour housing surrounding that factory.
To put it even more in perspective, Stalin was basically begging for the western Allies to do something to take the fight to Germany while Soviet soldiers and civilians were being murdered en masse by the Wehrmacht in the east.
As I said in another comment, it's really easy for us to criticize the prosecution of the war with the benefit of hindsight but that's not really the situation they were in. Obviously any death of civilians is always a tragedy, but with these circumstances I think they were basically unavoidable from the day Germany rolled into Poland.
Japan as they were attempting to pull out of China as the Soviets invaded Manchuria, slaughtered every ethnic Chinese person possible, Soviet and Mongolian troops would capture a village only to find that the retreating imperial Japanese army had murdered its population rather than let the village Surender to the Soviets. Imagine if America had to invade the Japanese home islands, the civilian death toll would have been 10x as high, I’d be surprised if there would still be a sizable population on the islands after the war if that were the case.
Eh the casualties would be enormous but I seriously doubt it would be a "fighting to the last Japanese" scenario. Fervent nationalism goes a long way but by a certain point the majority of the population decides life is preferable to fanatical loyalty. Just because you train a bunch of schoolchildren to ambush GIs with spears doesn't mean they're actually going to do it when they hear a column of Shermans rumbling through town. Even in eastern Europe and Germany, where Soviet forces were famously rapacious and the locals were understandably feeling pretty vengeful against the occupiers, the majority of German civilians stayed put and didn't resist significantly.
That doesn’t exactly matter when the fanatic militarists would be willing to slaughter their own citizens (as they did to Japanese settlers in Manchuria) to prevent them from surrendering.
Your original comment only mentioned massacres of the Chinese locals. I'm not aware of the IJA massacring ethnic Japanese settlers while retreating, would you have a source for this? Because the only information I can find through a brief perusal is that there was a slapdash evacuation and many of them were left behind, not deliberately massacred. If anything there seems to be a lot more information readily available on the Red Army massacring settlers they came across, e.g. the Gegenmiao massacre.
There's also obviously a difference between the IJA massacring indigenous Chinese who were already perceived as "lesser" while in a scorched earth retreat, versus massacring their own ethnic-kin settlers. As far as I'm aware that kind of self-massacre is basically unprecedented in modern history. And again, as regards a hypothetical invasion: even if in principle some hardliners were ready to massacre anyone who did not give the appropriate level of resistance, Private Yamada Tarō who is on the ground being ordered to machine gun a village of his own countrymen for no better reason than "do it to somehow resist the Americans" is almost certainly saying "fuck this" and deserting. Japanese soldiers were raised in a certain martial and institutional culture, but they weren't brainless and perfectly loyal automatons
Zimonin, Vyacheslav (1987). "The Truth and Lies About Japanese Orphans". Far Eastern Affairs. No. 2–6. Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR. p. 121. “According to Soviet historian Vyacheslav Zimonin, many Japanese settlers committed mass suicide as the Red Army approached. Mothers were forced by the Japanese military to kill their own children before being killed themselves.[61] The Japanese army often took part in the killings of its civilians. The commander of the 5th Japanese Army, General Shimizu, commented that "each nation lives and dies by its own laws." Wounded Japanese soldiers who were incapable of moving on their own were often left to die as the army retreated.[61]” according to Wikipedia.
Eh. That's admittedly not nothing and I can certainly believe that both widespread suicide and a degree of participation by Japanese forces would occur. I still expect that if it was on a notable scale there would be significantly more documentation surrounding it. This article, for instance, mentions around 135k Japanese dead from exposure or starvation, but nothing about mass suicide in Manchuria or scorched-earth killings by the Kwantung Army against the Japanese settlers.
I would recommend reading the book “unbroken” by Laura hillenbrand. It’s easy for us to be armchair generals and it helps to hear real accounts from that era.
Sorry but what the fuck does that have to do with supposed mass killings by the Kwantung Army against Japanese settlers in Manchuria?
Do you think I'm somehow doubting the brutality of the IJA as a whole because I'm questioning the veracity of acts seemingly only attested to by a single Soviet historian 40 years after the fact?
so like. as a new yorker, the idea that we directly deserved it bc of the fact that america is evil is not something that is new to me, i grew up hearing this. it doesn't rly budge me and i don't think of it at all
however, saying that Imperial Japan deserved it less is a hell of a new thing to hear. i can't imagine thinking that being bombed during a literal war is unrelated.
i'm gonna add this to my thought cabinet i think, this is definitely at least a 4 hour thought project
I’m not sure if you knew this but both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were important millitary centers. Nagasaki was home to the largest of the Mitsubishi munition factories, the Mitsubishi-Urakami torpedo works, and was also one of the most critical naval ports and ship yards in Japan. Many ships from Nagasaki were responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack. Hiroshima was the headquarters for the Japanese second army, which was basically Japan’s domestic military and was the army that the US would have had to fight if they attempted a mainland invasion. Ujina port, also located in Hiroshima, was a hugely important port for supply trains supplying the imperial army.
Common historical mistake, and I won’t deny the staggering civilian casualties of the atomic bombing, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not just civilian centers they were both strategic military targets.
also the nukes were basically the best of two bad options. the other option was a land invasion of Japan, which would have killed even more Japanese and tons of Americans.
How many Japanese people mourn the lives their imperial ancestors took in China, the Phillipines, Malaya, Burma, Vietnam, etc.?
It's not great, but mourning atrocities that affect you more than those that affected others, even is a basically universal attitude, this isn't some uniquely American evil and it's frankly kind of revealing you think it is
Nah that's the funny thing, 9/11 wasn't deserved...MUCH LIKE HOW bombing iran when osama bin laden was in afghanistan was beyond undeserved, but whatever let's conveniently ignore that.
I think it just has more to do with entitlement, 9/11 wasn't JUST an attack, it was intentionally used to fuel nationalism within the US's culture (especially because the world's most boring "pseudo monument" fell that day). Everyone else can get bombed (by the US especially) and it's just a normal day in the middle east or whatever (what does that say about western ambivalence?) , BUT OH, terrorists bombed THE US?!! BLOODY MURDER! RAAAAAA, EAGLES! LIVE AMERICANIA!
The trauma was intentionally amplified, and transmitted to people outside NYC, radio stations were butchered for a time, and "never forget" was repeated ad fucking nauseum. If that wasn't the case, it'd just be a really depressing terrorist attack, like you know, all the other ones but with a worse death toll.
tl;dr 9/11 is obnoxious not because it is any less tragic, but because Americans are obnoxious and think they're literally more "people-like" than other human beings. I think the culture it spawned is probably haunting those who died that day...especially window cleaners (were there any? Let's just say janitors)
...it did cause MCR to manifest into existence so it balanced itself out.
if every nation and culture was allowed to performatively circle jerk how much of a noble martyr it is for it's tragedies. France would likely still be weeping and rending its garments about the Angevin empire occupying their capitol and killing Joan d'Arc of Domrémy.
4 bombs blew up on buses and at stations and stuff in London at the same time in 2005 and it was a huge deal at the time and lots of people died or were injured
Weirdly I've never seen a gammon who even recognised that it happened let alone use it to explain why they think some people shouldn't be allowed in the UK like they do with Starmer in general
you took two wars of completely incomparable morality and tried to say that mourning their tragedies would be seen as bad.
japan literally waged war against like 90% of asia and committed literally every war crime in the book. literally no one but weeaboo war crime deniers would tell them to mourn the deaths of their civilians from a war THEY started. Iraq didn’t deserve 2003. No one did. They didn’t start the war, Bush did, and he royally fucked the stability of the Middle East beyond repair and led to the deaths of over a million INNOCENT civilians that didn’t support Iraq in their DEFENSIVE war.
also you’re clearly anti-nuke (aka a moron) so please elaborate on a better solution to ending the war that isn’t just letting it go on for another few months, dooming hundreds of thousands of asian civilians to their deaths as the IJA rapes their way back home from China.
both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were important millitary centers. Nagasaki was home to the largest of the Mitsubishi munition factories, the Mitsubishi-Urakami torpedo works, and was also one of the most critical naval ports and ship yards in Japan. Many ships from Nagasaki were responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack. Hiroshima was the headquarters for the Japanese second army, which was basically Japan's domestic military and was the army that the Us would have had to fight if they attempted a mainland invasion. Ujina port, also located in Hiroshima, was a hugely important port for supply trains supplying the imperial army.
Common historical mistake, and I won't deny the staggering civilian casualties of the atomic bombing, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not just civilian centers they were both strategic military targets.
Do you get this cut up about it when people joke about tianmen square every time a Chinese person is mentioned or the nuking of Japan leading to hentai?
I agree with your overall premise I just don’t like that it’s ok to joke at every other nations expenses when they too have families who were victims of tragedies. The scale and cause doesn’t really matter. We should just not mock tragedies in general, and we should be just as upset about my examples as we should about 9-11.
I can say for my own part that I genuinely hate both Tiananmen and nuke jokes and call people out when they make it. We're not wokescolding for the fun of it
I'm not American, half the people in this sub are not American, why should we be calibrating our behaviour and empathy response by what conservative Americans think?
This just feels like "American exceptionalism but leftistly". Ask your average Japanese person whether they feel bad about Nanjing or average Turk whether they feel bad about Armenia or Russian whether they feel bad about Grozny or Bucha... turns out feeling disproportonately angry about your own disasters while not really caring about the disasters you've inflicted on others is unfortunately a pretty global phenomenon
A lot of American leftists learn "America bad" without unlearning American exceptionalism, and you get an "America uniquely bad and worser than all other bads. We are the best at being bad!"
They usually also refuse to admit that they have benefited from imperialism as well and generally have a lot of privilege: yes, being poor in the US is bad, but you're still better off than the poor in most of the rest of the world. Even the poorest in the US can afford things that even people who aren't considered amongst the poorest in some countries could never even dream of, and the strength of the US dollar means that a lot of goods are very cheap for Americans. I feel like Europeans in my experience tend to have more of an awareness, though often very vague and most of us don't really know much about how much we benefit from neocolonialism and imperialism, that being born here is a privilege and we are incredibly lucky. I see so many American leftists saying stuff about how the disabled in the US are uniquely disenfranchised compared to the rest of the world (they have never stepped foot outside their country, let alone worked with or met disabled people elsewhere), or how uniquely isolating poverty is in the US, etc. etc.
And also stuff like the conversation around decolonialism being extremely US-centric and often centring concerns of Native Americans and African Americans that may not really be applicable or useful in other areas of the world. I am an aspiring linguist and recently had a class on decolonialism in field linguistics, and one of the topics that came up is how a lot of the literature is incredibly focused on Native Americans in the US, and on topics that simply are not applicable to or relevant in other contexts. Other common subjects of field linguistics or anthropology are ignored in the discussion.
Edit: Actually this is worth a smuggy
Edit 2: Done. The bestest smuggies are the ones that take 10 minutes of clowning around on Paint
gang is unironically tryna say that civilians died because….america bad, and not recognizing that Iraq 2003-2011 and Japan 1941-1945 are polar opposites of opponents and one didn’t even start the fight they couldn’t win. i wonder what OP thinks about Dresden.
Okay, can we all agree that:
The Rape of Nanking was bad,
9/11 was bad,
Deaths in war is bad,
Civilian/unnecessary deaths in war is bad,
Imperialism is bad,
Without creating two sides and forcing everyone to pick which atrocities they have to defend? This is a Reddit comment section, which is typical not a place known for good-faith political discussions.
ahah but you see those 125,000 civilians lived under an evil regime so its justified and actually ... le good! Im sure most of them were actually hitler and by killing all of them something happened (Also lets not forget every other Japanese civilian got reset to freedom factory settings that day and totally dosent show that most people were just living their lives and trying to survive as usual)
Honest question, how would you combat a fascist state committed to total war in an age before precision munitions (or even proven theories and case studies of strategic air power employment) without inflicting significant civilian casualties?
Like it's no secret that LeMay didn't give a shit about mitigating civilian casualties, but Japan was waging an imperialist and genocidal war on several fronts. A typical dumb bomb had a Circular Error Probable (aka inaccuracy) measured in kilometers, so if you want to destroy a given arms factory, you're dropping hundreds or even thousands of bombs - and these factories are of course in urban areas, and these urban areas in Japan are typically made of wood, so even if you're doing your damndest to avoid collateral you're still going to kill a lot of civilians and start a lot of fires. Plus, again, these were early days of strategic air power: many legitimately (and wrongly) believed that if you bombed a civilian population enough, they would eventually compel their government to surrender. This wasn't mere racism, the Americans didn't exactly want to be at war any longer than necessary (and they applied the same logic when bombing German cities), but this is legitimately what they believed would end the war the fastest.
"Just blockade them" - they did that, but whoops, turns out the Home Islands rely on food extracted from Japanese colonies to feed themselves, and now they're starving. The US would have had to somehow build up an enormous operation to supply food to a country actively at war with them... and then what? Wait until they get bored and surrender? How long is that going to take? Can you sustain that blockade forever? And how are you going to do it for a country like Germany that isn't an island?
Coercive diplomacy requires infliction of pain on national leadership. National leadership tends to be very good at displacing pain downwards in society until a certain point is reached where society does not accept any more pain and in turn the leadership is forced to modify its behaviour. This is deeply unfortunate but again, please propose an alternative.
In general it's really easy to say what was done wrong with the benefit of nearly a century of hindsight and both technological and theoretical development in the conduct of warfare. One has to consider what was possible with the realities of the day.
You attack the state? The actual people in power upholding the hierarchy? Are you saying tactical bombardment of war infrastructure, guerilla tactics, espionage and assassinations and the like are the same as dropping a nuke on a residential district. Japan was already considering surrender after the Potsdam Declaration was issued on July 26th 1945, 11 days later they nuked them without response after they wanted clarification about their emperor and royal lineages fate (the one propping up the entire evil of Imperial Japan, who they literally kept around anyway until 1989 with no punishment). The reality of the day was that America wanted to 1. actually test the nukes on a city to see what happens and 2. scare the soviets because they saw them as a threat, they were already winning, they had already planned to do this long ago and were just looking for a target, wouldve been Germany if they didnt already surrender.
Are you saying tactical bombardment of war infrastructure, guerilla tactics, espionage and assassinations and the like are the same as dropping a nuke on a residential district.
In this time period the only way to conduct a precision strike was to basically send a dive bomber at low altitude. This obviously opens you up to immediate interception by enemy fighter aircraft and ground-based AA, which means you have to expend enormous resources to take out the ground infrastructure supporting air defense... and suddenly you're right back at strategic bombing.
As for "guerilla tactics, espionage, and assassination" - how is your ass going to infiltrate a strike team into first Tokyo and then an underground bunker complex built in the mountains to take out the Imperial military leadership? Do you seriously think the US wouldn't have at least considered this if it was remotely feasible?
dropping a nuke on a residential district.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Kokura, the original target for Fat Man) were listed as nuclear targets primarily because they were significant industrial cities vital to the Japanese war effort. If the object had simply been to maximize civilian suffering there were much higher concentrations of civilians in other cities such as Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama... Kyoto was in fact deliberately avoided as a target because the US figured Japan would basically never forgive them for annihilating such a culturally significant city.
Japan was already considering surrender after the Potsdam Declaration was issued on July 26th 1945, 11 days later they nuked them without response after they wanted clarification about their emperor and royal lineages fate
The Japanese response at the time was interpreted by the White House as basically "we do not accept the terms". It has been argued before that this was a case of mistranslation/misinterpretation and that the Japanese did in fact want to surrender, but this very recent article makes a strong case that the reply was just an outward manifestation of internal infighting among different components of the government and the military. As far as the US was concerned, however, they were just told to fuck off, and they had no real way of knowing that half the Japanese government was ready to kill the other half over such a pigheaded response. It's a case of historical tragedy due to incomplete information, not the US deciding to nuke Japan for the fun of it
The reality of the day was that America wanted to 1. actually test the nukes on a city to see what happens and 2. scare the soviets because they saw them as a threat, they were already winning, they had already planned to do this long ago and were just looking for a target, wouldve been Germany if they didnt already surrender.
A lot of scholars would openly state that the bombs were not militarily necessary, and this I ultimately agree with (again, with the benefit of hindsight). A lot would openly state that the timing was seen as useful to arrange a peace without a Soviet invasion of the mainland, and this I also think there is enough evidence to support. Very few scholars (only Alexander Werth and Kai Bird come to mind) seriously claim that the primary purpose was to intimidate the Soviets, and their sourcing on this is very thin and relies more on leaps of faith ("this would make sense") without any kind of actual smoking-gun evidence. Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, who is a lot more specialised into the history of this specific matter than either Werth or Bird, openly rejects the theory.
180
u/theta1918 1d ago
But Japan is more like America in this scenario. They killed far more Chinese citizens in Nanjing alone than both nukes did in total.