The mentality of the Japanese at the time was a strange mix of militaristic and superiority to other eaces but subservient to their superiors in what was effectively the remnants of a feudal system.

how completely unlike Britain of the time.

The tactics of WW2 would have dictated that it was impossible for Japan to hold out for more than a few years(Personally I think that’s a stretch), Guerilla war works to a point when the likes of the Geneva conventions are getting followed and soldiers are following certain rules of engagement, but Japans cities if not nuked would have been fired bombed and burned to the ground. WW2 was a war of attricion. It would have been a messy hell, but it would not have lasted decades.

Plus it was a war of industrial capacity, once industry was destroyed it was just a matter of time.

Every Japanese person I’ve met has been polite and meek.
A total contrast to the people who waged the war time atrocities.
You can imagine Germans being total bastards but not the Japanese.
What is the switch that turn(ed)s them?

gobuchul – Member
Have you even seen the newsreel footage from the Battle of Saipan where the women are jumping from cliffs with their children to avoid surrender.

The japanese were fed stories of barbarian hordes and the like, I doubt things like you mention happened out of honour, but out of fear of how their captures would treat them

The hand wringers should really read up on what the Japanese were really like.

So we’ve changed the argument from ‘we would still be at war with Japan had it not been for nuclear weapons’ to ‘it was morally justified’.

Two clearly completely different arguments.

As I said on the previous page :

The only thing up for discussion is by how much the nuclear attack on Japan shorten the war. And of course whether it was morally justified.

.

EDIT : On the point of “what the Japanese were really like” apparently not so bad that immediately after the war we couldn’t treat them as friends and business partners. Very few were put on trial with only 25 individuals being considered serious enough criminals to be classed as “Class A” criminals. They didn’t need to escape to South America. Emperor Hirohito the most powerful Japanese war criminal during WW2 was even allowed to keep his job, he merely had the humiliation of having to announce that he wasn’t really God. He lived a very long and comfortable life which continued long after WW2.

how much the nuclear attack on Japan shorten the war.

Impossible to answer exactly. However, several months would be a good starting point. Even a couple of weeks would of saved a lot of lives.

And of course whether it was morally justified.

Yes it was.

It saved a lot of Allied lives and allowed the liberation of the POW’s sooner.
It avoided an invasion of mainland Japan which would of been extremely bloody.
It saved a lot of Japanese lives, both civilian and military.
It demonstrated the power of atomic/nuclear warfare which probably prevented the Cold War turning hot.

Morality isn’t a word I’d personally ascociate with ww2 or any war. It always comes down to necessity. There is no morality in war. Think about what you are moralising about, the mass murder of civilians. You’ll tie yourself up in knots trying figure out the morality of all that.

Ernie, you really are a knit picking bore at times.

alpin – Member
Ernie, you really are a knit picking bore at times.

😆

What is the switch that turn(ed)s them?

Since you didn’t answer your own question I’m going to suggest: The Bomb

Yes of course it’s nitpicking to point out that Japan would have lost the war anyway even if nuclear weapons hadn’t been used, and that we wouldn’t still be at war with them today.

Btw there’s no ‘k’ in nitpicking.

The argument for the first bomb was very different from the argument for the second, though. For the first, it demonstrated 2 things that would be hard to do without a strike on a city. 1, the effect, and 2, the will to use it on a city. Shock and awe, and commitment, basically.

But the second one? Those points were proven, its purpose was to show it wasn’t a one off and that could have been done with an offshore drop, or on a less inhabited piece of land.

TBH there’s room for argument on the first and lots of good arguments on both sides. I’ve never seen anything that convinced me Nagasaki (or rather Kokura, which was supposed to be the target) was justified.

As far as the big picture- it’s complicated. General LeMay believed it was a war crime even as he gave the order, Szillard believed it was a war crime while he helped develop the bomb. War isn’t tidy, it’s awful, and what people seem not to want to do, is to accept that it could be simultaneously state terrorism, a war crime, and yet justifiable. Those men went into it with eyes wide open, it’s kind of weird that a lot of people nowadays seem unwilling. Maybe it’s a reality of war thing, the more divorced you are from the reality the harder it is to believe the extremes it takes you to.

VJ Day ‘Celebrations’ ?
I think you’ll find it was a comemoration ceremony for our war dead, there was no celebration only thanks for what our brave men and women endured, sacrificed and went through at the hands of the barbaric Japanese that tortured, murdered and mutilated them.
I have as much sympathy and understanding for the Japanese at that time as they showed my uncle and other British and Commonwealth POW’s.
As Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris said…. You reap the wind etc

ernie_lynch – Member

Btw there’s no ‘k’ in nitpicking.

What is that thing in bold between the ‘c” and the ‘i’ then? 😛

bloodynora +1

The Japs started their war. The nukes finished it. Better a few 10s of thousands Japanese killed than thousands of allied servicemen killed invading the Japanese mainland.

Judging by the firebombing results prior to this it would seem almost morally right to use nucluer weapons, they appear to have caused less deaths and with only one plane involved the environmental damage caused by their gas hungry engines was minimalised, there, everyone’s happy.

On a more sensible note +1 Bloodynora

Its a celebration of the end of conflict, if it was a celebration of the start I would feel a lot different.