My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/08/world-war-ii-hiroshima-history-memories/

by cs702 • 12 months ago

18 37 12 months ago

washingtonpost.com

theletterf• 12 months ago

https://archive.is/20250808195317/https://www.washingtonpost...

GauntletWizard• 12 months ago

https://archive.ph/8DTod

arrowsmith• 12 months ago

My ancestors also fought in WWII. So did most people's — it was a world war, after all.

Does this author think that having ancestors who fought in WWII makes him special, or his opinion more valid?

nine_k4• 12 months ago

It makes his ancestors opinion, which he mentioned, more valid.

mhh__• 12 months ago

No but it's very high status amongst affluent dinner party types in the west to communicate in these entropyless parochialisms.

polotics• 12 months ago

Well you know what, none of my ancestors fought in WWII... So, visiting the Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo, I was quite shocked by the interpretation of history on the walls there, that was stating that Japan had been strangled of any resources access by the West, and had to attack Pearl Harbour as a desperate measure of self defense. Taking pictures was forbidden but I took one anyways, and some older Japanese man accosted me, asked for my nationality, I answerer truthfully being from a smaller southern european nation, and he laughed in my face clearly thinking that country name meant hilarious inferiority. This was in 2006, not so long ago. A Large black bus was loudly spewing out extreme-right propaganda outside. Left that country, thought about their birth rate...

PaulHoule3• 12 months ago

... it drives me crazy that there is a drumbeat over this every year in the US, which feels some real guilt over this and has had some reconciliation of it with Japan whereas people in China, Korea and elsewhere in Asia are 1000x angrier about what Japan did to them than how Japan is angry with the US and where there has been much less reconciliation.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just an attempt to keep a cloud spread over atomic energy.

nine_k4• 12 months ago

Believe it or not, there are people who think that a world without nuclear warheads and the MAD equilibrium [1] would be safer. This is despite the documented history of several millennia of such world existing, and being plagued with constant wars fought with conventional weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

TimorousBestie2• 12 months ago

I’m a bit confused by your phrasing. Isn’t our world also plagued by constant wars fought with conventional weapons?

PaulHoule3• 12 months ago

There are nuclear weapons and then there is nuclear power. I think fear over nuclear weapons is weaponized to keep us dependent on fossil fuels. People weren't so worried about "world wars" prior to 1900 or so because they didn't have fossil fuels to drive/sail/fly around.

archagon• 12 months ago

Even a war at the scale of WWII every half-century is far better than a nuclear exchange.

MAD works until it doesn’t. It’s almost inevitable that some cretin will hit the shiny red button at some point.

petsfed2• 12 months ago

It's not over atomic energy. It's that it's no coincidence that all 5 members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. The threat of their use gets things done, and that fades the more countries have nuclear weapons. So, insofar as there is a sinister motive to Hiroshima drumbeating, it's specifically to preserve the viability of the nuclear threat. Consider how different the current war in Ukraine would look if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons. How different would the situation in Gaza look if any of Israel's immediate neighbors also had nuclear weapons?

I'd also argue that the correct emotional response to the destruction rendered by a single airplane (vs. the 325 used for the Tokyo Firebombing) is abject horror, and that should cause any person to seriously question their use.

I'm not here to dispute that nuclear power is good or that the alternative to bombing Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki was worse than the bombings. It's that while Truman et al may have understood the extrema situation the Allies were in, that's no guarantee that future users of atomic weapons would be so deliberate.

PaulHoule3• 12 months ago

The current situation might not be stable in the long term.

Ukraine now regrets giving up their nuclear weapons.

The "red line" of Ukraine attacking either Crimea or internationally recognized Russia was crossed and revealed to be a bluff.

The wall against proliferation will eventually break. For the life of me I can't figure out how Iran had a much harder time refining U235 with centrifuges than Pakistan did in the 1970s; I mean, I can understand how the US has been unable to deploy centrifuges to make enriched uranium for reactors (the same reason we can't have so many other nice things) but why Iran?

The lesson of Gaza may be that a people in a similar situation might want to have nuclear weapons at all costs. There definitely are paths left out of the conventional analysis of proliferation paths (accelerator-based methods, AVLIS) and even though they could reduce the footprint of producing the fuel they are also all super-high tech.)

bell-cot2• 12 months ago

I wonder if it's just an attempt to keep a cloud ...

Yes, but only peripherally. Atomic energy and atomic weapons are closely associated with a certain wealthy white western superpower. And within that superpower's political and ruling classes, there have been centuries of ideological struggles for what might be called "moral supremacy". Given how strongly the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombing push many people's "Moral Issue" buttons - those naturally become a point of contention, with plenty of folks weighing in on them whenever it seems opportune to do so.

bell-cot2• 12 months ago

True. And this short article barely scratches the surface of the region's pre-WWII history - even major turning points like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthqua... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact

nine_k4• 12 months ago

Beside that, I like the idea that the nuclear bombing saved numerous lives of the Japanese, who did not have to experience and die in fire bombings or being recruited to fight on the streets, in the fields, and in the mountains. The battle of Iwo Jima [1] can serve as an example how bloody such fights might be.

In 1945, the Japanese Empire was training schoolchildren to fight with bayonets and sharpened bamboo logs, to make them part of land defense operations. The nukes made the emperor surrender and prevented all that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima

ohdeargodno• 12 months ago

"Nukes made Japan surrender" is a lie americans keep repeating to make themselves feel good about what is probably one of the most horrible mass civilian casualty event of the last century. Every single serious researcher, both at the time and today agree that Japan would have surrendered. Every single event, document, information points this way.

Justifying nukes with "we could have done something worse" is... an incredibly american thing to say, yes.

gerikson2• 12 months ago

The US had already firebombed many Japanese cities with conventional weapons, causing death and destruction on the scale of Hiroshima

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...

Using the atom bomb was just making an existing policy more effective, because you could flatten a city with one bomber instead of ~300.

The bombs didn't cause Japan to surrender. The bombs plus the Soviet declaration of war, invoking both the almost certain defeat of the Kwantung Army on the Asian mainland and a grueling defense against both the Soviet Union and Western allies contributed too. And the surrender was almost stopped by a coup at the very last minute.

readthenotes1• 12 months ago

You should change your name to "Captain Straw Man"--Funny how you translated "nukes saved American lives" into "nukes made Japan surrender".

njrc9• 12 months ago

Many people who were in positions to know the real conditions and prospects opposed the use of nuclear bombs on strategic and ethical grounds: https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2021/06/05/who-opposed-nuking-j...

tenacious_tuna• 12 months ago

For Japanese casualties, the predictions were essentially limitless, since the plans included bombing every city in the invasion’s path with the tactics used on Tokyo. Viewed through this pitiless lens, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only saved 100,000 American lives but also forced Emperor Hirohito to surrender, saving millions of Japanese lives and turning the country into a bastion of democracy and one of America’s most valued allies.

This keeps being repeated. The US's own survey corps concluded that the nuclear bombing was unnecessary for ensuring a Japanese surrender, and in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Bombin...

maratc• 12 months ago

in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia.

Assuming you mean USSR, who declared war on Japan on August 8th 1945, we need to believe someone used a time machine to travel to the future before they authorized the first atomic strike on August 6th?

mixmastamyk• 12 months ago

May be, but hard to prove either way without an A/B timeline test.

"Military historian Gian Gentile disputed this counterfactual, stating that testimony from Japanese leaders in USSBS interrogations supported the likelihood of Japan continuing the war beyond November and December 1945. Gentile stated that survey authors chose not to publish such evidence, as it challenged their conclusions."

delichon• 12 months ago

The command at the time had fresh memories of the suicidal resistance from Wake Island to Okinowa. You can imagine the large impression all of the bodies made on them. It must have been hard to convince them that the rest of the Japanese were different, and to bet so much on it.

sandinmyjoints• 12 months ago

Yeah, the parent comment is interestingly and carefully phrased -- it is not claiming that the decision makers at the time could have known that Japan (according to this one report, anyway) would have surrendered without the bombings or invasion, but rather that since it is the case they would have (again, according to this report), that people should not claim the decision to bomb saved lives.

daft_pink• 12 months ago

You are mixing up two ideas.

The survey stated that Japan was going to lose the war with or without nuclear weapons as strategically Japan was overmatched, which was obviously true.

However, this survey was looking at Japan’s overall defeat, not the timing of surrender or the number of casualties avoided by dropping the bomb. At the time, US military planners were working with invasion timetables that projected tens of thousands to hundred thousands of US casualties if the US invaded Japan.

The survey doesn’t deny that many more American or Japanese soldiers might have died in the weeks or months before surrender if the war had not ended immediately after the atomic bomb was droppped.

opo2• 12 months ago

Your link says this:

...Military historian Gian Gentile disputed this counterfactual, stating that testimony from Japanese leaders in USSBS interrogations supported the likelihood of Japan continuing the war beyond November and December 1945. Gentile stated that survey authors chose not to publish such evidence, as it challenged their conclusions.

The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.
...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...

Japan had every intention of defending the main islands just as strong, or stronger, starting with operation Ketsu-Go. One of the slogans in Japan in 1945 was "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."

https://irp.fas.org/eprint/arens/chap4.htm

As user 542354234235 pointed out in an earlier message:

...Every option (invasion, mass starvation via blockade, atomic bombing) was a horrific nightmare of death for the Japanese.

Unfortunately, I think that was situation the Allies found themselves in.

...and in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia

This idea keeps getting repeated by revisionists, but is not credible. While the Soviets considered invading Hokkaido after Japan surrendered, very few people think they would have succeeded. The USA had given the Soviet Union some ships that could be used, but they would not have been nearly enough.

jcranmer2• 12 months ago

The role of the atomic bombings in compelling Japanese surrender is still hotly debated, and will remain so until the end of time because, quite frankly, we don't have the historical record that will conclusively decide the debate.

Strategic bombing, outside of maybe the two atomic bombings, has never compelled an enemy's surrender despite several attempts to do so. And the fact that the bomber corps's own survey, trying to argue for the value of its work, suggested that it alone was capable of bringing Japan to surrender without any other forces given enough time should be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism.

jcranmer2• 12 months ago

Some pretty gross historical inaccuracies here, in an opinion piece trying to tell people to be mindful of historical context:

One of the last rooms of the museum next to the shrine contains a long, well-illustrated explanation — in Japanese and English — of how President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and it makes a pretty convincing case. I hadn’t realized how steadily Roosevelt had cut off Japan from copper, from American scrap steel, then from oil.

... the US cut those off because of Japan's invasion of China. It's actually a pretty gross whitewashing of Japanese history, the same reason why China and Korea are so frustrated at Japan: Japan constantly pretends that the only thing it did wrong was lose WW2. Blaming the US for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor is exactly the same kind of thing as blaming Ukraine for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Americans weren’t exactly innocents on this score, since we had taken the bases that the Japanese attacked in December 1941 — Hawaii and the Philippines — from the unraveling Spanish and British empires.

Uh... the British Empire didn't unravel until after WW2. The Philippines were taken from the Spanish. But Hawaii was a fully independent kingdom, and even after the sugar interests sponsored a revolution that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and then begged to be annexed by the US, the US dithered and only annexed it a few years later when the Japanese were making a move to annex Hawaii instead.

1659447091• 12 months ago

The Philippines were taken from the Spanish

Spain got $20 million and trading access for the Philippines.

TimorousBestie2• 12 months ago

I think it’s possible to deplore both the war crimes committed by the Japanese and the war crimes committed by the Americans. I don’t see the need to compare one to the other, to pretend to solve some impossible utilitarian equation that demonstrates either dropping the bomb was right or dropping the bomb was wrong. Too much discourse on this topic depends on whatever happened in those counterfactual timelines that in any case we can only imagine and cannot observe.

The important thing, which gets lost in the endless unresolvable discourse on blame and responsibility and ethics, is not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.

eska• 12 months ago

I have wondered about this for a long time, but HN seems to talk about this topic rather often for a tech site. Why is this the case? I don’t think this is the right place for such discussions and they never lead anywhere.

My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading

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