IGtR= wrote:
Ketara you forget the ideological element to the military strategy in combination with the practicality. America was aiming for a "hard surrender" as this is the most optimal result if one is to achieve long lasting results.

An armistice or surrender due to blockade would not be significant.

Contrast the Armistice in 1918 with the utter defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, equally compare the Korean war with the Vietnam war. Both roughly contemporaneous and yet completely different outcomes due to the lack of spectacular definitive outcome in Korea.

My point is that America needed to utterly defeat Japan for it to start to rebuild as a new nation rather than just to carry on doing what it was doing before.

 Grey Templar wrote:
We did issue a threat to bomb Japan off the face of the earth. But even if we had been explicit saying ''we have a bomb that can destroy an entire city by itself'' they wouldn't have believed us. They didn't even believe Hiroshima had been totally destroyed at first, it really took the second bomb to make them realize what was happening.

And the bomb did save Japan. Even if they wouldn't have all fought to the death like was originally thought, it would have been extremely bloody. Far more than the bombs killed.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 whembly wrote:
^Yup.

Ya'll forget... Japan didn't surrender until AFTER the 2nd bomb dropped. So, dropping it 1st on an uninhabited island wouldn't do gak.

They had three days after Hiroshima before Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki. That's not a whole lot of time to come to terms with what just happened.

I disagree. Blockade is generally an ineffective form of resolving a conflict, it is true. But island nations are the exceptions that break the rule. Japan was especially vulnerable with it's low amounts of arable land and mineral resources. If America had wanted to, it could have reduced Japan to being a very primitive society indeed just by blockading the trade routes and smashing any heavy industry through regular bombing.

 Frazzled wrote:


We'd firebombed all of Tokyo and they didn't surrender. What does bombing a deserted island do?

And in the year or years that took how many millions of Chinese would have died?

 Ketara wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:


We'd firebombed all of Tokyo and they didn't surrender. What does bombing a deserted island do?

Unfortunately, surrenders are usually dictated by people at the top. Who, in a military dictatorship, are snug in a bunker underground with the best food and resources.

And in the year or years that took how many millions of Chinese would have died?

Why does a blockade preclude eliminating the few remaining isolated outgunned ill-supplied cut off Japanese troops in China?

 Frazzled wrote:


IIRC there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers in China. This would just move the casualties to China.

As you noted, safe in their bunker the command would not surrender. In the end the Allies would still have had to invade Japan.

 Desubot wrote:
Im pretty sure those bunkers where not nuke proof.

no one would of accounted for that.

 Ketara wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:


IIRC there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers in China. This would just move the casualties to China.

The remaining Japanese forces had already been kicked about by the Soviets to the extent that some people theorise it was a bigger contributing factor to the Japanese surrender than the nukes.

According to a report submitted by the Japanese Headquarters, there were in the China Theatre (excluding Manchuria), Indochina north of the 16th parallel, and Formosa over 1,385,000 Japanese troops and over half a million Japanese civilians.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Im pretty sure those bunkers where not nuke proof.

no one would of accounted for that.

Actually, considering the (lack of) accuracy of early nuclear weapons, the odds of getting a good enough hit on a hardened position ought to be rather slim, although I'm far from an expert on the subject.

 Scrabb wrote:
Ketara, I think your link there lays it on a bit think when applying moral blame, yeah?

No one knew how deadly the radiation was. The Americans were going to march their own troops through it and all.

Telling us about the persecution the fallout survivors suffered at the hands of their countrymen shouldn't fall on America, no?

And the Japanese navy were like nothing Americans had even encountered before. Unbelievably low capture rates owning to the Japanese military culture owning the vast majority of fighting aged males heart and soul.You've been talking about this whole thing as though Japan were just your average state during wartime. That's not terribly honest.

All that said, I cannot argue with your conclusions. The US didn't need to use the nuke, but decided they'd rather do that than give Russia a foothold. Not keeping the high ground there. This moral lapse occurred before the nukes, it's just that firebombing isn't as sexy as nuking something.

 Ketara wrote:

Telling us about the persecution the fallout survivors suffered at the hands of their countrymen shouldn't fall on America, no?

There's a certain amount of responsibility attached to deliberately giving people a condition that leads to others mistreating them. If I inject someone with HIV, I bear some small responsibility for the subsequent mistreatment of future poor treatment on that account.

I'm not entirely sure who else but America is responsible for America employing nuclear weaponry.

 Desubot wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

Telling us about the persecution the fallout survivors suffered at the hands of their countrymen shouldn't fall on America, no?

There's a certain amount of responsibility attached to deliberately giving people a condition that leads to others mistreating them. If I inject someone with HIV, I bear some small responsibility for the subsequent mistreatment of future poor treatment on that account.

In hindsight. since no one knew that would of happened.

Frazzled wrote:How about the guys that started it.
How about the guys in charge that wouldn't surrender.

Yea, I'm pretty sure they were the responsible ones.

When you point out that there was a third option though, that of blockade, the reaction is normally one of , 'Well, they shouldn't have started it then!' as if the Japanese initiation of hostilities and atrocities gave America carte blanche to initiate them right back at any scale and come out morally unblemished.

 Frazzled wrote:
You said blockade yes. Then I pointed out there were nearly 1.5 million Japanese troops in occupied lands and you were merely shifting the casualties somewhere else, and then you STILL would have had to invade Japan, with then same casualties.

 n0t_u wrote:
Bit naive to believe that.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
What would people have the Japanese nation (acting through its government) do?

 Frazzled wrote:


Yes but if I shoot two guys who were making the bullets for guy X so he could shoot guys A-H then there is no equivalency.

You're arguing blockade. Blockade does nothing but increase the kill count.
*Hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops in China die.
*Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Chinese die.
*Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Japanese die from starvation.
*When the Allies STILL are forced to invade, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions die.
Blockade does nothing but increase the killing.

 Ketara wrote:

 Desubot wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

Telling us about the persecution the fallout survivors suffered at the hands of their countrymen shouldn't fall on America, no?

There's a certain amount of responsibility attached to deliberately giving people a condition that leads to others mistreating them. If I inject someone with HIV, I bear some small responsibility for the subsequent mistreatment of future poor treatment on that account.

In hindsight. since no one knew that would of happened.

I'm not sure that, 'I planned to vaporise them instead of give them a medical condition, honest!' is much of an improvement.

 Desubot wrote:


But it is entirely different.
while both are terrible anyway
One is a quick death the other is malicious torture over time. the intent matters and saying they deliberately caused rad poisoning is pretty bias.

 Ketara wrote:

 Desubot wrote:


But it is entirely different.
while both are terrible anyway
One is a quick death the other is malicious torture over time. the intent matters and saying they deliberately caused rad poisoning is pretty bias.

I don't believe I ever did?

 Ketara wrote:


There's a certain amount of responsibility attached to deliberately giving people a condition that leads to others mistreating them. If I inject someone with HIV, I bear some small responsibility for the subsequent mistreatment of future poor treatment on that account.

 Desubot wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

 Desubot wrote:


But it is entirely different.
while both are terrible anyway
One is a quick death the other is malicious torture over time. the intent matters and saying they deliberately caused rad poisoning is pretty bias.

I don't believe I ever did?

 Ketara wrote:


There's a certain amount of responsibility attached to deliberately giving people a condition that leads to others mistreating them. If I inject someone with HIV, I bear some small responsibility for the subsequent mistreatment of future poor treatment on that account.

besides the original quote?

It's an excellent thing that isn't the case then. The Japanese merchant fleet was obliterated by the time of the nukes, so there's absolutely no question of them supplying Japanese troops in China with munitions.

It's a slow meter of destruction. Food was scarce in Japan, but hundreds of thousands aren't going to keel over and die next week.

Chinese civilians aren't all going to be loaded up in trains and sent to gas chambers,

and Japanese troops aren't going to insist on dying to the last man.

Estimates of the numbers of Japanese personnel taken prisoner during the Pacific War differ.[1][26] Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata states that up to 50,000 Japanese became POWs before Japan's surrender.[41] The Japanese Government's wartime POW Information Bureau believed that 42,543 Japanese surrendered during the war;[16] a figure also used by Niall Ferguson who states that it refers to prisoners taken by United States and Australian forces.[42] Ulrich Straus states that about 35,000 were captured by western Allied and Chinese forces,[43] and Robert C. Doyle gives a figure of 38,666 Japanese POWs in captivity in camps run by the western Allies at the end of the war.[44] Alison B. Gilmore has also calculated that Allied forces in the South West Pacific Area alone captured at least 19,500 Japanese.[45]a

As the Japanese forces in China were mainly on the offensive and suffered relatively few casualties, few Japanese soldiers surrendered to Chinese forces prior to August 1945.[46] It has been estimated that at the end of the war Chinese Nationalist and Communist forces held around 8,300 Japanese prisoners. The conditions these POWs were held in generally did not meet the standards required by international law. The Japanese government expressed no concern for these abuses, however, as it did not want IJA soldiers to even consider surrendering. The government was, however, concerned about reports that 300 POWs had joined the Chinese Communists and had been trained to spread anti-Japanese propaganda.[47]

The Japanese government sought to suppress information about captured personnel. On 27 December 1941, it established a POW Information Bureau within the Ministry of the Army to manage information concerning Japanese POWs. While the Bureau cataloged information provided by the Allies via the Red Cross identifying POWs, it did not pass this information on to the families of the prisoners. When individuals wrote to the Bureau to inquire if their relative had been taken prisoner, it appears that the Bureau provided a reply which neither confirmed or denied whether the man was a prisoner. Although the Bureau's role included facilitating mail between POWs and their families, this was not carried out as the families were not notified and few POWs wrote home. The lack of communication with their families increased the POWs feelings of being cut off from Japanese society.

The Office of the Provost Marshal General (OPMG) supervised[11]:8 the 425,000 German prisoners. They stayed in 700 camps[14] in 46 states; a complete list may not exist because of the small, temporary nature of some camps and the frequent use of satellite or sub-camps administratively part of larger units.[17] Other than barbed wire and watchtowers, the camps resembled standard United States or German military training sites;[12][18][11]:33 the Geneva Convention of 1929 required the United States to provide living quarters comparable to those of its own military,[15] which meant 40 square feet (3.71 m²) for enlisted men and 120 square feet (11.15 m²) for officers.[13]:xxii If prisoners had to sleep in tents while their quarters were constructed, so did their guards.[19] The three admirals and 40 generals in custody were sent to a Mississippi camp, where each had his own bungalow with garden.[15]

Government guidelines mandated placing the compounds away from urban, industrial areas for security purposes, in regions with mild climate to minimize construction costs, and at sites where POWs could alleviate anticipated farm labor shortages.[18]

Ouze wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Agreed but going way OT methinks.

Yes, I'm sorry that the civil war discussion dragged things OT for a page. My intent was only to illustrate that I imagine it's a pretty natural instinct to want to downplay the awful things that our forebears did. I think there are only a handful of countries that have really owned up to their past unpleasantness, right? Germany, Australia, South Africa come to mind.

Also, didn't Japan apologize at some point in the past? I could swear they made an apology, formally, for Nanking. Perhaps I am misremembering.