El Topo said:
There really is a defense force at GAF for the murder of ~200,000 civilians.
You're doing everybody a disservice when you try to boil down a 70 year old historical debate to catty remarks. I could waltz into a vaccination thread and say "wow there really is a defense force for stabbing children with needles" or an Operation Overlord anniversary discussion and say "woah there are people here who think invading foreign countries is a good thing?!" Nobody here is stoked that people died.
The context is key. The United States was making preparations for a land invasion of Japan. Now that it has captured air fields in range of Japan it has initiated a strategic bombing campaign aimed at crippling industry and lowering morale. These weapons are obviously imprecise because the technology for precision bombing doesn't exist. It's common knowledge that strategic bombing will result in large numbers of civilian deaths. Despite this, its military value is considered too important to forgo. At the outbreak of the war in Europe, both Axis and Allies were hesitant to bomb cities, but eventually a series of accidents and changing priorities led to both sides relaxing restrictions and engaging in all out bombing campaigns. Well, I should say the Germans were hesitant to bomb British cities, since they had no problems wiping out Poles en masse with air raids. The Japanese never had any compunctions, really. They started strategic bombing Chinese cities in 1938, before the European war had even started. The efficacy of mass air raids is questionable. Some times the air raids demoralized, and other times they strengthened national resolve. Its effect on war industry is difficult to calculate because there are so many factors at play - in 1944, German total production rose, leading some to believe that it had "no effect". In fact, the rise is attributable to industrial investments from previous years finally bearing fruit, and they failed to meet their projected production by 25-33%. That would indicate a very serious disruption. This is information we have thanks to post-war analysis. At the time, it was very firmly believed by many that strategic bombing would reduce morale, and would damage industry, so this is what the decision makers were basing their actions on at the time, irrespective of what it's "real" effects may have been.
Is strategic bombing, generally, a war crime? We would consider indiscriminate bombing campaigns now to be a war crime. But is this merely because we now have more precise tools and it is possible to wage a war while minimizing casualties? If a JDAM hits a civilian building in the year 2015 that was incorrectly interpreted as a military target because of faulty intelligence, we generally would not prosecute the bombing crew as war criminals. We engage in combat today knowing that a certain number of civilians will definitely, 100% die, despite our best efforts. If at some point in the future we develop some novel technology to guarantee that this doesn't happen, would we similarly look back on the wars of the late 20th and early 21st century as conflicts innately filled with war crimes on this basis? That's possibly an interesting discussion we could have, although as of World War II, all major actors didn't see it that way and considered it a necessary part of waging a modern war. At the Nuremburg trials, Nazi leadership was not put on trial for engaging in strategic bombing.
Back to the narrative. The atomic bombs, originally planned for use against Germany, are instead distributed to the Pacific theatre since the Germans had already surrendered by the time they were ready. At this point, preparations for the land invasion are proceeding rapidly and Operation Downfall's first phase is scheduled for November. Based on experience fighting the Japanese at Okinawa, casualties are anticipated to be extremely high (trivia: the US military still awards Purple Heart medals to this day that were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties from the invasion of the Japanese home islands in WWII). The invasion of the southern-most large Island is allocated between 150,000 and 200,000 people in ground forces, with the next stage after this allocated 300,000-350,000 in ground forces. The Japanese allocated between 350,000 and 500,000 for the defense of Kyushu (the target of the first phase of the allied operation) although some estimates I've seen (which are probably counting all the low quality militias they planned to raise) are as high as 900,000. 40+ aircraft carriers and 20+ battleships were allocated to the invasion of Kyushu. Thousands of aircraft. This was apocalyptic shit for such a geographically small area. Post-war analysis indicates that the Allies grossly underestimated the defenses that the Japanese would have on hand, both number of aircraft and number of troops on the ground. There is a serious chance that the operation could have failed, or at least resulted in a far costlier battle than anticipated and fail to meet its objectives in a timely manner.
What of the Japanese civilians? Another part of war that doesn't get a lot of play because it's not very sexy is naval blockades. The IJN was rusting at the bottom of the ocean for the most part by this point in time, and it won't surprise you to learn that the Japanese home islands were net importers of food. Everyone knows about the famous German U-boats, not a lot of people realize that the US Navy had a shitload of them too and they were highly successful (and didn't wind up being turned into so much pressurized mincemeat). Unrestricted submarine warfare was being waged on Japan from 1941 onwards, and the Rice harvest of 1945 was especially bad, 30-40% lower than normal. Oil imports from the Southern extent of the Japanese empire (note: they still controlled parts of indonesia et al at this stage) were less than 10% of what they had hoped to import and what they needed. To put it bluntly, they're fucked in the long term, and the longer the war goes on, the more people starve. I'm not talking about "a few" here and there, I'm talking about high hundreds of thousands or low millions. The strategic bombing we talked about above would
not have ended, either. Tokyo is often mentioned because it's a horrifically bad example of a firebombing, but over
sixty cities were hit in the months that the campaign was being waged in real life. These campaigns absolutely would have continued, and possibly even intensified further as more and more air assets transferred from the European front. The thing about the Atomic bombs is that they weren't even unusually bad by the standards of mass air raids on Japan. They were some of the worst hit cities, but not
the worst, and contribute only a fraction of the overall deaths caused by this in the general case. So could you really, from the perspective of an American politician or general in 1945, hold some kind of unique moral outrage about dropping superbombs on Japanese cities that were already scheduled for mass air raids on account of housing war industry and military bases?
The ethical calculus is thus as follows - we can drop two atomic bombs on Japan and try to force their surrender immediately. If successful, this would prevent hundreds of thousands of casualties on our side. It would prevent hundreds of thousands of casualties on the Japanese side. It would mean an end to any further bombing of civilians. It would bring an end to the blockade of Japan and the associated breakdown of society and mass starvation. It would bring an end to the mass scale horrors being committed by the Japanese soldiers on mainland Asia. Two horrific shocks to prevent many future evils. This seems so overwhelmingly obviously acceptable in the context of World War II. So what's the big deal?
Well, the historical debate is that some people contend that some other factor caused the Japanese surrender, not the atomic bombs. Some people argue that the atomic bombs in conjunction with these other factors caused the surrender. Some people claim that the Japanese were "about to surrender" regardless of what happened, and thus it was an
unnecessary measure for forcing surrender. Further, some people claim that the United States "knew" that they were about to surrender and deliberately ignored this information. I personally believe that the combination of atomic bombs and Soviet invasion ultimately caused the Japanese surrender, although I consider the further conjecture about the US having knowledge of an intention to surrender any day now to be at best weak and at worst deliberately deceiving. But with that said, the great thing is we can sit down and have a discussion about this.
"Defense force for murder of civilians" indeed.