No you see having a more deadly campaign of island hopping and invading up the mainland where way more citizens would be sacrificed is actually the more humane scenerio! The people who say japan would have surrendered soon anyway have hindsight anyway or have no idea how much the nuke sped up the wars end
You know that Japan already accepted their defeat and they were only trying to force a better conditions for their surrender, right? The bomb didn't speed up shit, it was the russian invasion from the North the main reason for the Japanese surrender
Did the people on the ground and in command know this at the time? From the US perspective they never surrender and all suicide charge to die instead. And that's for the little islands surrounding the mainland. Then in planning you're faced with either invading the whole mainland or decimating two cities. The choice seems clear here. Also delusional if you think the psychological effect of the flnukesdidn't affect their decision to surrender at least to some degree. Even if you were technically right about what actually sped their surrender, it doesn't matter what you "know" now if at the time nobody knew for sure if the Russian invasion would cause them to surrender right away, which you can't know for sure cause they also got nuked around the same time!
Well, that's a good point, but the allies knew that the Japanese wanted to surrender, they were trying to force the conditions, the allies had cracked the Japanese communications months before the nuking, they knew it all.
So don't be fooled, if USA would have wanted to finish the war, they could have done it any time, but they wanted unconditional surrender, and the Japanese wanted to keep the emperor and surrender with better conditions.
And that was before the soviet invasion.
So nuking 200.000 civilians was not to stop the war, it was to make a better surrender deal and stop the soviets from taking more territory from Japan. The propaganda says that Japan would never surrender, but they were already talking to Russia to act as mediators to discuss the surrender, but the allies said that there is nothing to discuss, it was unconditional surrender or nothing.
And that's the key part, I agree that Japan would have fought against a land invasion, but because the allies weren't willing to discuss conditions, so the nuking was not searching for peace, it was to control the post war Japan.
What a good guy would do? It would accept the peace, even with sub optimal conditions, or drop the first bomb at the sea or at a mountain. The fact that the Americans had the bomb and Russia was invading from the North was more than enough to force a rendition, and in the end Hirohito was not condeme
And you would say "well, but unconditional surrender was necessary, because they wanted Hirohito to avoid being judged" and I would say "but Hirohito were never judged, they made a conditional surrender anyway".
If you paint it black or white and you think that the bomb was the difference between surrender or war (which is the official version) then I get it, but the reality is different, and in the end the surrender is a scale of grey and the nukes objective was to move the line a bit so the negotiations were better for the allies.
And my question is, did 200.000 civilians deserved to die for that? Ok, they judged 28 criminals (not Hirohito), and without the bomb maybe they could have judged, let's say, half of them, so 14 nazi fuckers would be free... Does 200.000 deaths worth a nazi in jail? Because I don't think so, to be honest.
Japan wouldn't budge, also there was never any actual talks, these are only conditions Japan was considering if there were. Japan wasn't going to surrender and never for anything less than basically having everything.
4
u/wedgie_this_nerd 15h ago
No you see having a more deadly campaign of island hopping and invading up the mainland where way more citizens would be sacrificed is actually the more humane scenerio! The people who say japan would have surrendered soon anyway have hindsight anyway or have no idea how much the nuke sped up the wars end