A Somber Anniversary – August 6, 1945

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And 3 days to the second one … 🙁

I’m glad we can still say that it’s only been two.
This is one pandora’s box that should have never been opened.

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To anyone who hasn’t, I highly recommend listening to Dan Carlin’s Hard core History episode from about 3 years ago (adequately titled The Destroyer of Worlds). It is about shaping national and international policies on nuclear weapons in the 50s and 60s. It is really astonishing that we haven’t all evaporated seventy years ago.

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What’s important to remember here is that 80,000 died in Hiroshima, 40,000 in Nagasaki (even though the bomb was twice as powerful … yes, you can “miss” with an atom bomb).   That many people were being killed in conventional firestorm raids on places like Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, etc., on a fairly regular basis.  It just took 1,000 bombers instead of one.

The Japanese were offered terms several times through the summer of 1945, better terms than Germany ever received.  In late July, the “unconditional surrender of Japan” internationally demanded in the Potsdam Declaration was amended to the “unconditional surrender of Japanese armed forces,” meaning the Emperor could remain on the throne.

Rather than take this way out, the Japanese took it as a sign of American weakness.  Oops.

Even if you double Hiroshima and Nagasaki death tolls for wounds, radiation, etc, you wind up with 120,000.  This is less than 5-7% the projected death toll, mostly civilians, anticipated for Operation Coronet, Operation Olympic, and Operation Downfall, the planned invasions of Japan scheduled for October 1945 and March 1946.  This doesn’t include the 100,000 – 500,000 American fatalities projected, possibly doubling the entire American death toll of World War II.

It sounds crazy, but if you leave aside emotions and look at the facts and the numbers, it’s pretty much undeniable that the atom bombs saved at least five million lives, most of them Japanese civilians.

Add to this the fact that the Soviets were getting involved (they invaded Manchuria on August 9 and were preparing to invade northern Japan, they’d already invaded southern Sakhalin Island, which they hold to this day).

So we would have wound up with a North Japan and a South Japan, like we did with Korea and Vietnam.

So tack on a few more million dead from the inevitable war that would have followed in the 1950s or 60s, and flush any chance of Japan’s economic miracle along with the rest of the Pacific Rim.

Of course, what’s really important is that it never happens again.

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A friend of mines father was earmarked for the first wave for the first or second wave for the invasion of Japan and he always said none of those first 2 waves expected to return home

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Thanks for this Jim

Fascinating insight mate, and very much appreciate the knowledge!

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And let us not forget that 120,000 death toll for the combined nuclear attacks is about half of the 200,000 + killed by Japanese troops in Nanjing.

War is brutal even when the accepted ‘rules’ of conduct are being adhered to. When this becomes mass slaughter of civilians in a collective act of barbarism one can see the outcome of the development of a super bomb to end the conflict is almost inevitable.

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@torros – my paternal grandfather was a medic slated for either the Kyushu or Honshu invasions.  Japanese snipers were specifically trained to shoot medics first.  Its not out of the realm of possibility … that if not for the atomic bomb, my whole family doesn’t exist.

Thanks, @warzan !

Indeed, @tankkommander , atrocities in the Pacific War were absolutely horrific.  While not as widespread as some of the worst European examples, many Pacific ones are somehow more barbaric.  Swords, bayonets, death marches, American pilots tied to weights and thrown off Japanese warships, mothers throwing their own babies off the cliffs of Saipan, biological and chemical weapons tested on Chinese POWs as part of Unit 731 (Google that shit, but not right before bed, Josef Mengele would be ashamed), heroin / opium trade funding part of the Japanese Army (and to be fair, the Kuo-min Tang Chinese Nationalist Army as well – this was basically the start of what we’d see with the “Golden Triangle” after the war).   And of course the OSS were no angels in French Indochina, either.

Also in regards to the conduct of the war, again to be fair, are American submarines during the war.  This included sinking of Japanese troop transports and then machine gunning Japanese survivors in the water.  American submarines devastated the Japanese naval and merchant fleets so badly that by the end of the war they were torpedoing wooden junks in Japanese estuaries.

In fact, when the Nuremberg Trials were wrapping up, and Admiral Karl Dönitz was initially sentenced to death for the “war crimes” of his U-boats, Admiral Chester Nimitz, CinC of US Pacific Fleet, wrote the tribunal and said (paraphrasing): “You’d better string me up too, because we’ve done far worse over here.” Dönitz’s sentence was reduced to 10 years if memory serves (slave labor in building U-Boat pens, political connections, he was the Second Führer, after all).

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