General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Hiroshima - quit lying to yourselves [View all]cab67
(2,990 posts)...it's a matter of many thousands, or even millions, of them.
Dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima killed a great many civilians, including children. This is deeply tragic, and each one should be mourned. But had we invaded the Japanese main islands, the number of civilian casualties would have been far, far greater. This isn't just a mental experiment - the Allied military had direct empirical evidence that this would be so.
There weren't many battles in the Pacific Theater that were blacked out from media access for much of the action. One of them was the Battle of Saipan, and another was the Battle of Okinawa - and in both cases, the rationale included the horrific number of civilians being killed. (This wasn't the only rationale - just one of them.) We didn't have smart bomb technology, and civilian, military, and industrial targets tended to be linked more tightly than in most Western countries. Plus, many civilians were committing suicide rather than deal with surrender. The decision to drop the A-bombs and end the war before an invasion was necessary was based - not entirely, but in part - on a desire to minimize civilian casualties.
A couple of other factors contributed to the large number of civilian deaths at Hiroshima. First, most US military planners assumed civilians would head for shelter when the bombers showed up, thereby being spared the worst of the blast. But the people of Japan had seen US bombers come and go for many months by then. One or two bombers was a recon mission, weather observation, or maybe delivery of propaganda leaflets - not exactly good, but not really a threat, either. Bombs were dropped by large formations of bombers, not the two or three that would have been involved in the A-bomb attack. So civilians didn't hide when the Enola Gay and the observation planes arrived.
Second, most of the scientists involved assumed (incorrectly) that the radiation resulting from the bomb would be washed out of the soil in a relatively short amount of time.
As for "the Japanese were ready to surrender" - not entirely. Some were, but wanted conditions. There were others in power who really did want to fight to the end.
I do think the Soviet invasion of Manchuria played a role, but not as large a role as others believe, mostly because the scope of the invasion may not have been fully understood at the time of surrender. And anyway, why would being chased out of Manchuria lead to a surrender when being chased out of the Pacific, including islands they'd held since before the war (e.g. Marianas), did not?
My 0.02. I take no pride at the fact that my country stands as the only one, to date, to have used nuclear weapons against another country. But given the mindsets at the time and the reality of what an invasion would have done to all sides, I can accept the rationale behind it.