Nagasaki

Today is the anniversary of Bockscar dropping Fat Man on Nagasaki. Wednesday, it was the anniversary of the Enola Gay dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima.
These were terrible events, but they were needed. A lot of people don't realize that the Japanese were ready to have EVERY MAN defending the beaches. It wouldn't have mattered if you were 6 or 60, as long as you were male and could hold a gun, you would be defending the beaches from the US Army. They were ready to sacrifice every man to defend the island.

Comments

[I NO LONGER EXIST]

START A WAR?

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WE'LL END IT.

[abphinsom]

Compared to all the other things we did during the war, I'm always surprised at how worked up everyone gets over us dropping the A-bomb.

First time targeting civilians? nope.
First time using large bombs on targets with almost no military value? nope.
First time civilian city bombing and ensuring firestorm killed over 100 000 people? nope.
First time enemy warned in advance of attack? yes
First time a single bomb did the work of dozens of separate bombers and hundreds of other bombs? yes.

Saved the Japanese nation from total annihilation? CHECK.

I mean, it was either that, or run all 1 million active servicemen onto the island and massacre everyone alive. I honestly think you are mistaken; only the men might have the guns, but the women and children would readily have picked the guns off the dead men and shot the soldiers in the back as they advanced; everyone would have needed to be killed, injured/incapacitated, or imprisoned to ensure the taking of Japan, no exceptions for gender or age, except in the rarest of circumstances.

But it was atomic!
And?
At what point is anything else the US did during the war acceptable or fundamentally different from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that would make those events so tragic or violent compared to everything else we did? Was Dresden less horrific just because we used conventional firebombs, even though we killed more people in that single bombing than both combat uses of Atomic weapons combined? What about Tokyo, where almost a million people died in the firestorm that boiled people alive as they jumped into canals for relief from the flames, and them proceeded to melt the concrete lining the canals due to the excessive heat?
We bombed Rome, and with it the Vatican (though not intentionally for the Vatican, I doubt serious effort was made to avoid it). We specifically targeted non-strategic civilian populations long before Hitler started raining buzzbombs on England.

No MAD ensued.
It convinced the Emperor of Japan to exercise his authority and force the Japanese military commanders to surrender.

War is hell. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise by overly emphasizing the Atomic bomb attacks on Japan without contextualizing anything else that happened in WWII is out of touch with reality.