OTOH, that calculation should probably include the entire bombing campaign, not just the nukes. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t isolated events, they were the climax of a campaign of mass attacks against Japanese civilians.
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Excellent point—any blockade to force surrender through starvation would have been accompanied by continued firebombing, which would resulted hundreds of thousands more casualties.
LeMay, like Bomber Harris in the European theater, was pathological about proving the worth of strategic bombing.
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Here’s an interesting thought experiment: why is the firebombing of Dresden often held up as the canonical example of Allied war crimes (or at least “regrettable in hindsight”), while the firebombing of Tokyo (and sixty-five other Japanese cities) is largely ignored?
Nah, it’s not that interesting. The answer is obvious. It’s related to why Japanese-Americans were interned while German-Americans remained free.
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Sorry/ not sorry.
The firebombing of Tokyo and other cities are overshadowed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, which are the real canonical example of Allied war crimes. Dresden has a large degree of visibility mostly due to concerted Nazi propaganda efforts to play up that particular bombing (followed up by neo-nazis like Irving, which was repeated as fact in Slaughterhouse Five) - consider for example the much lower publicity given to the Hamburg and Cologne bombings, where similar or greater numbers were killed. If you believe the fabricated numbers, more people died in Dresden than in the Tokyo firebombings.
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I watched the video again this morning because I thought it was a good idea to remind myself what this was all about after a long thread that was rarely about the thing thing in the headline. It clarified for me what’s been getting at me this whole time.
The student featured in the video says specifically they aren’t asking that the logo be changed. Rather, they say they have learned a lot about American culture as an exchange student, and they hope they can teach their fellow students something about Japanese culture.in return.
The thing I’ll walk away from this video with is the comment that a bomb blast is composed on the things that were destroyed, that a mushroom cloud of a destroyed city is a great plume of buildings and people and pets and works of art and a million other things.
This teenager thought it was reasonable to ask a bunch of fellow highschool students and friends to understand that while they take pride in their logo as a symbol of strength and uniqueness, they might also understand it as a reminder of war and a promise not to do that again. Put their faith in their fellow teenagers, believing that they could be understood. I’m glad they didn’t place their faith us.
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Thunderbirds, ho?
If we’re going by raw numbers, more people were killed in the Allied fire-bombings of Japan than in the atomic bombings.
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Yes, but that doesn’t mean what I said is untrue.
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