I’m Australian, not American.
I’m not a great fan of a lot of American foreign policy and military adventures, or more usually misadventures, since WWII, so I’m not automatically pro-American.
But America, with useful help from its Allies including Australia, was the major force which defeated Japan.
Without America, Japan probably would not have been defeated. Certainly not in the mid-1940s.
Without America, my parents and my grandparents and their contemporaries would most probably have been slaughtered or worked to death or starved to death (or all of the above) in the same way that Japan did that everywhere else it went, and more so because of Japanese outrage about the White Australia policy.
If you think that Americans have strong feelings about Japan, you ought to find out how Australians feel as they, unlike Americans, were at the end of the line of Japanese advance and rightly feared invasion, which was never going to happen to America despite some early fears there.
If America hadn’t decided to base troops in Australia in 1942 we quite possibly would have been conquered by Japan in one way or another.
By basing troops here America, even if it did it for its own strategic reasons, probably saved Australia. And for that every Australian should still be grateful to America.
As for nuking Japan, if America hadn’t done that then a lot more Allied POWs would have died in captivity in Japan and various Japanese occupied territories where the Japanese starved and abused and tortured and withheld ample medical supplies from them as they had done since early 1942.
For example, if America had nuked Japan a couple of months earlier this would have avoided the extermination of nearly 2,400 Australian POWS on the Sandakan death marches, which left only six survivors out of those 2,400 men. http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-battles/ww2/sandakan.htm
Don’t expect me to get all upset about Japanese casualties from the atomic bombs and regard the atomic bombings as war crimes when the Japanese leadership, realising that they had lost, were happily exterminating Allied POWs to try to conceal their own war crimes and setting up their own people to die in the millions in the pointless defence of a defeated country.
And don’t think it’s funny to upset Americans or anyone else with your ill-informed comments based on the same sort of selective blindness which allows some Japanese to present themselves as victims in the atomic bombings rather than participants, willing or unwilling, in the aggression and inhumanity which led to those bombings.
Yes.
That is exactly what alarmed my parents’ generation as Japan advanced towards us, because they knew that that was what Japan would do here against the hated Europeans.
Okay, now you’re the man with all the Allied power in 1945 who has managed to live until 2010 when everyone is judging you with the benefit of hindsight and without the urgency and sentiments attached to the war which you have waged against a brutal enemy for the past four years or so. Justify why, with the benefit of hindsight, it was so much worse to nuke Japan than to pursue the only other two choices available to you.
The choices were:
- Strengthen the naval blockade of and air attacks upon a virtually defenceless Japan and slowly starve untold millions to death over however many years until the recalcitrant Japanese leaders finally decided to surrender, if ever.
- Implement the invasion plans for Japan and kill millions upon millions of suicidal Japanese facing the well armed invaders with wooden spears etc.
- Nuke a couple of military-industrial cities, killing a few hundred thousand people, and hope to shock the leadership into surrender, thus avoiding the consequences of the two preceding choices.
Which of the first and second choices do you think was so much better than the third? Why? And how was it less hard on the Japanese people than the atomic bombs?