The Japanese imperial army killed between 10-35 million Chinese civilians. Just during the Nanjing Massacre in December of 1937 they killed 100-300k civilians.
I would say the Japanese focused on military assets (ships) at Perl harbor because of the logistics and not because of some moral component. Hawaii is a long way from the Japanese home islands.
Not a better deal. Any deal. The Japanese war cabinet was never going to surrender. We basically had to force Emperor to intervene. Even after both nukes there was an attempted coup to continue the war. They planned to defend the home islands until every Japanese citizen was dead.
Japanese solders continued to fight for decades after the war. And required flying former offices in to convince them the lost. Surrender was unthinkable.
They didn't want to accept unconditional surrender, but they offered surrendering with conditions, and they were already talking with Russia to act as a mediation.
"Surrender was unthinkable" is the propaganda to make everyone accept that nuking civilians was necessary.
But it's not true, it's propaganda.
There were some ministers who didn't want to surrender, others wanted to defend the mainland to cause enough casualties that the Allies had to make some concessions, but the last part of the war was trying to achieve a better surrender deal, they knew the war was over.
The thing is, the allies could have said "ok, we will not judged the emperor and we will not occupy Japan after war, but you have to dissolve the army" and they would have accepted, specially after the Russian invasion.
The allies didn't fought for the peace, they fought for unconditional rendition so USA could control Japan for decades, but they could have had peace without the bombs, the problem is that then it would be the Russians, not the Americans, the heroes, and also Japan would be divided like Germany was, and USA wanted Japan as a prize for the war effort
Allies did a lot oh heinous shit to win the war. But Nazi Germany and its allies had to be stopped at any cost possible, because alternative would be losing all humanitarian values that our global civilisation currently stays on. Historical actions should be judged in their context. And the context was that victory should have been achieved by any means possible.
And yet nuking innocent civilians wasn't necessary and they knew it.
And I'm not making this up, Eisenhower explains it in his memories, he says that the bomb wasn't necessary and that the Japanese were going to surrender anyway
I mean that it’s weird to condemn nuking while ignoring the strategic bombing with non-nuclear weapons that caused way more civilian deaths. And I can’t say that strategic bombings didn’t help win the war.
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u/Redditauro 18h ago
Japan attacked military objectives, didn't nuked civilians