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Did We Need to Nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

crescent said:
I think we might be in violent agreement, because otherwise your posts bear no relation to mine.

I agree that the Japanese government would not have surrendered without the use of the atomic bombs, at least not for a long time and after even greater bloodshed. I never stated otherwise.

ETA: I did propose a hypothetical scenario, but I never made any implications as the likelihood of that scenario being plausible. It was only intended to demonstrate that even in the most rose-tinted-glasses type scenario of what could have happened if the nukes were not used, the death toll might still have been higher than what actually happened. I made no claim that the scenario I laid out was even remotely plausible.
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This post was not yours?
crescent said:
The argument being made is that the war was going to end anyway, so that the millions of additional casualties would not have occurred, and that this non-nuclear surrender would have made the atomic bomb drops unnecessary, so that the people who died there didn't need to die.

It is not an argument I am in agree with, but your post is a very inaccurate straw-man of what the OP is proposing.
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abaddon said:
I think you wildly underestimate the will of the Japanese to fight on to the death if necessary. The last Japanese soldier surrendered in 1974.
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I remember that. He'd been on duty in the Philippines all those years. They had to round-up an old superior officer to order him to surrender.
 
John Jones said:
I remember that. He'd been on duty in the Philippines all those years. They had to round-up an old superior officer to order him to surrender.
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IIRC, he had a few compadres also, half a dozenish from memory and his cell was not the only one. Memory is a bitch. Now you are going to make me look it up.
 
abaddon said:
This post was not yours?
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Yes, and in that post i made it very clear that i disagreed with the OP.

ETA: Admittedly the second paragraph has a typo, instead of "not in agree with" it should have read "not in agreement with", but I don't think that changes the meaning. The first paragraph states a common argument, the and paragraph states that I don't agree with that argument.
 
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John Jones said:
I remember that. He'd been on duty in the Philippines all those years. They had to round-up an old superior officer to order him to surrender.
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Bells are ringing. Was it not that he had to be relieved of his post without surrender or some such malarkey? ISTR that there was some odd legalistic gymnastics involved.

Dammit, you have once again invoked my inner research fairy. Have you no shame?
 
crescent said:
Yes, and in that post i made it very clear that i disagreed with the OP.
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Nope. you frankly got caught in an abject error and are now attempting to save face.

That may seem harsh. It is not. Everyone who ever walked in shoe leather makes mistakes. You do, I do, every member here does. What of it? So long as one is willing to own one's errors, then that's OK.

Make no mistake, it is not unknown that I have personally doubled down on egregious error from time to time. I have 13.5K posts thereabouts. Statistically speaking, there must be wild errors in that lot. How could there not? Post count does not speak to verisimilitude or truth. I am flat out certain that I have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick and run a marathon with it.

Olive branch thusly extended, do as you will with it.
 
smartcooky said:
Any way you slice it, no amount of claims by some generals that the war was going to end or that they didn't want to use the bomb or that the Russians might invade, will affect three key facts about this issue...
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In particular, the mention of Eisenhower is disingenuous.

Ike had been been posted all war on the European theater. At the time the bombs were dropped, Germany had surrendered, but Ike still had his hands full to keep order and bring food to a devastated country on the brink of starvation. He simply had no more knowledge of the Pacific theater and the stance of the Japanese government than the average GI.
 
abaddon said:
Nope. you frankly got caught in an abject error and are now attempting to save face.

That may seem harsh. It is not. Everyone who ever walked in shoe leather makes mistakes. You do, I do, every member here does. What of it? So long as one is willing to own one's errors, then that's OK.
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You are very condescending, but "not in agreement" means what means, typo or not.
 
No, but in my opinion, it saved Japan's sovereignty.

It was better for Japan to surrender to the US only, rather than to US and USSR.
 
I think that this question only comes in hindsight, with people assuming emotionally that since the Japanese did surrender they would have surrendered.

However, the Japanese Imperial army had a long history of excellent moral, even in the face of defeat, and showed a willingness to fight to the death.

The Kyujo incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident) is a clear indication to me that many in the Imperial Army did not want to surrender, even after the USA dropped both atomic bombs on Japan, and the decision to surrender had already been made by their government.
 
The USA did not need nuclear weapons to bomb Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki since the USA could have bombed these cities in the same way that the USA bombed several other Japanese cities.
 
bobtaftfan said:
Did We Need to Nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
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Ugh. This again. Look, my wife's Japanese so it's not as if I wouldn't have reason to speak out against the bombings, but it's just a fact that a lot of American troops would have died that didn't because they didn't need to invade the Japanese home islands. In fact, more Japanese would've died too, given that they probably would've armed the civilians to fight. This way, they broke their morale, which is probably the "cleanest" way to win a war.

So, no, they didn't need to. But it was the best possible outcome.
 
crescent said:
You are very condescending, but "not in agreement" means what means, typo or not.
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Sorry. but you are wrong. It is not condescension. We know the Japanese would have put up a stolid fight to the death. We have evidence to this fact. Hiroo Onada died in 2014, but not before he unleashed an autobiography of his 30 year non-war saga. The Japanese government had to locate his former commanding officer and fly him to the Phillipines to officially relieve Onada from his post before he would finally surrender IN WRITING. Japan was about to surrender? No they weren't.
 
abaddon said:
Nope. you frankly got caught in an abject error and are now attempting to save face.
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What are you talking about, man? Crescent said very clearly right off the bat that he didn't agree with the OP, but that your post misrepresented the OP because said OP claimed that the war would be over and that those millions of Japanese and Americans wouldn't die at all.

That's all he said. Can we get back to bashing the OP now?
 
Alrighty then. Could be I misconstrued a post or three. If so, I'll own it and apologise for wandering down the wrong trouser leg.

And I agree. Perhaps we should move right along with the meat of the topic.

ETA: Upon re-reading this reply, I suspect it might not appear as intended, but I chose to leave the original as is. I trust you understand my intent and not my fumble fingered words.
 
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