> The Japanese empire’s bloody march through Asia was over. But the impact on civilians lingered, both in the countries the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces had invaded and at home, where a nuclear Armageddon had come twice.
They killed 3,000,000+ people in their invasion of China alone! They butchered people for the sake of butchering them, starved many more, used humans as test subjects like the Nazis, dropped "plague bombs" on Manchuria... there's a reason that Korean, Chinese, and Filipino people still often have strong feelings about Japan. Japan has also had a "struggle" with coming to terms with their guilt in these matters, avoiding "small issues" like memorializing war criminals, and accepting what they did.
The article and most accounts focus on the terror and the horror of the bombs, while somehow missing that conventional firebombing (i.e. of Tokyo) was both more deadly and just as horrific. The need to create a specific "the nuclear attacks were inhuman, inhumane, horrific, special" is ultimately self-serving and often used as deflection from self-examination.
The article and most accounts also ignore why the US government undertook both the conventional and nuclear bombings: Because in the end an estimated 25,000,000 human beings died in the Pacific Theater, in the context of an overall war (all theaters) of more than triple that number. The prospect of continuing to go island-hopping at tremendous cost to human life just so that the Imperial Japanese leadership didn't have to surrender was a non-starter. An alternative existed, strategic bombing, and part of that ended up being nuclear.
Another issue with the narrative as written is that it's framed as entirely an attack on civilians, focuses on their experiences and ignores why the cities in question were chosen, what industries existed in them, and what their role was in the war. Putting this together with the rest and it's increasingly hard to see this pattern as something other than historical revisionism. The same contortions aren't required when discussing what happened to Berlin or many German cities for example, because their horror is understood to have served a purpose and/or been the result of actions taken by the Germans themselves.
To be clear, none of this is to deny the suffering of civilians in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or Tokyo or Dresden or Berlin... all of that is very real and deserves to be a part of the history we discuss, part of the horror of the war. BUT NOT LIKE THIS. Not as the centerpiece, not in a way that confers a kind of passive victimhood on Japan and its people.
If Japan did not surrender when they did, it is very likely the Soviet Union would have gobbled her in no time. People think that the US would have invaded the home islands and in the process would have lost X lives and inflicted Y losses on the Japanese themselves. In reality, by the time the US was going to invade, the Soviets would have finished the job long before. And Japan would be like North Korea to this day. The bomb, while tragic, ensured that Japan was under sole US occupation, and the US engaged in reconstruction, rather than in plunder like the Soviets did in East Germany [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
Those raids were cruel, and I'm just not at all worked up over using "the bomb" as an alternative to that.
duxup•17h ago
War is hell, if only the consequences could be contained to those who choose it.
Gys•17h ago