Some historians disagree with you, others don’t.
People tend to think Japan’s government was far more coherent than reality permitted. It lacked real central leadership and tended to run on its own momentum. Leaders being undermined by subordinates acting on their own accord, then dragging everyone else in.
This is how Japan’s occupation of Chinese ports received in the Russo-Japanese War metastasized to occupation of Manchuria and invasion of the rest of China. It is how the Pearl Harbor attack got approved despite fierce rivalries for control between the Japanese Navy and Army.
The Emperor, the only figure who could act decisively for the nation, avoided doing anything “imperial” until the A-bombings.
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Well, yeah…just as “some historians” believe that Hitler launched Barbarossa because Stalin was on the verge of invading Europe, and “some historians” believe that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor but let the attack happen. One can find all sorts of folks asserting such things as facts, but they are not supported, and indeed contradicted, by the actual record.
With all due respect, the facts I laid out above are not opinions with which reasonable people can disagree–they’re the objective, historical record. I fully recognize that reasonable people acting in good faith can and do disagree (vehemently) about the moral justification for using the bombs, but the argument that “Japan tried to surrender before Hiroshima” is just not accurate.
I recognize that there are a lot of post-war quotes that get passed around about how Japan was on the “verge” of surrender, or had no hope of winning and knew it, or could have been convinced to surrender otherwise, but the vast majority of instances in which these quotes are used omit the context in which they are defining what else needed to happen before Japan would have surrendered. Again, the moral calculus of whether those other things were more or less horrific than the bombs is another question.
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While most people in the west tend to know of Grave of the Fireflies, I would recommend checking out Barefoot Gen which portrays the horrors of the war in a very different way that’s very affecting. It’s focus is more on the citizenry, and it’s very critical of the powers involved in the war based on the author’s lived experience.
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Barefoot Gen is great.
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Very good indeed.
More on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
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“Wilfred Burchett was the first Western journalist… to reach Hiroshima after the bomb.”
https://apjjf.org/-Richard-Tanter/2066/article.html
George Weller was the first to reach Nagasaki
Both were there within a month of the bombings and reported on the immediate devastation. Weller’s report was censored and presumed lost for decades afterwards.
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I do wish more people today were aware of the devastation caused by the firebombing campaigns against Tokyo and Dresden. Estimates are that the firebombing killed around 100,000 Tokyo residents, compared to 70,000-80,000 initial deaths at Hiroshima and 40,000 or so at Nagasaki. (Yes, that went up over time).
That doesn’t justify or lessen the horrors of the atomic bombings in my mind. Intentionally targeting a civilian area with indiscriminate bombing is a war crime (or should be) regardless of the type of explosives used. Whether committing war crimes is justifiable in order to shorten the duration of a war is not something I feel like getting into right now. I know how I feel about it but YMMV.
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Tokyo was one of many cities treated that way. Plus the firebombing had the effect of disrupting transportation networks within Japan.
You had to wait about 30 years later for that to happen. It took the carpet bombing campaign in Vietnam for the UN/Geneva/Hague to revise their warfare conventions to ban indiscriminate attacks.
You weren’t going to make much headway on that in WWII when the Axis turned terror bombing into a fine art form, and that the primary source of enforcing laws of warfare at the time was reprisal (not war crimes trials).
One is reminded of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, literally the toughest man on the face of the planet. Survivor of both atomic bombings. The man Robert Oppenheimer could not kill!
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The laws of war have always been so strange and arbitrary to me. To this day it’s legal to use napalm and incendiary weapons, but not chemical weapons. Even non-lethal (or less-lethal) weapons such as tear gas and stink bombs are illegal to use in warfare, yet are ok to use domestically for “riot control.” Blinding enemy soldiers with lasers is forbidden, but shooting them in the face with bullets is fine.
I was reading the memoir of a WWI anti-zeppelin pilot, and he described how if you had “dum-dum” bullets in your plane’s gun you needed to have a certificate with you explaining that you were specifically on an anti-zeppelin mission in case they were shot down and captured. It was ok to shoot down zeppelins with those bullets but using them directly against people was considered a cruel war crime.
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Prior to the Nuremberg Trials, laws of war were enforced by a balance of terror. You didn’t commit atrocities because you were afraid of giving your enemy the pretext to do the same. You treated POWs properly because you wanted your own treated the same and likewise with other acts of war.
The idea was to prevent acts which would inflame hatred so much that it would make peaceful resolution an impossibility.
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The rules of war afen’t dictatedfrom above they are mutual agreement between countries. What they can live with.
The nazis badly mistreated Soviet POWs in WWII , the Soviets hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention.
The Red Cross attempted to ensure POWs were treated OK, though I don’t know how much success.
At one point nazis started chaining some POWs, I forget the reason. So the Allies started chaining German POWs. I have a length of chain with a note saying it had been used to chain a German POW in Manitoba during WWII. A retaliation.
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Sure, but that doesn’t make them any less strange or arbitrary to me. Why would a country prefer to have its soldiers burned alive to being hit with tear gas or a blinding weapon? But I’m sure that I’m trying too hard to make sense of something that’s inherently senseless.
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Another japanese Cartoon about WWII and how It affected The common people.
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Before the bombing.
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