• DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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    7 months ago

    When Hiroshima was erased in less than a second, the Japanese navy had been eradicated.

    The status of their mainland holdings was irrelevant, because they were under blockade.

    Their air force was out of planes, oil, and pilots.

    Their mechanization program basically never happened in the first place, and their tanks were irrelevant to a military that had marched to Berlin.

    Their miracle weapon programs were failures or still in development.

    They’d lost 2 million troops trying to conquer China, Korea, and the Philippines and killing 20 million people in the process.

    They knew from the start that victory against America alone was impossible. The warmongers just thought the filthy gaijins would surrender if they sank enough of the Pacific Fleet.

    They had agreed to abide by the Geneva Conventions and then immediately broke their word.

    They had already seemingly refused a conditional surrender offer.

    The person writing the paper that council of academics pulled their ideas from has been repeatedly found falsifying documents and denying the Rape of Nanking.

    The USA waited three days between bombings to give them time to surrender in the face of power even the most delusional could not deny.

    Do you know what happened instead?

    The military tried to launch a coup to stop the surrender after the second bomb, the Kyuju incident. The War Minister tried to enlist the rest of the government to help against the wishes of their literal God Emperor.

    Get fucking real with your “They were going to surrender anyways.”

    Now if want to argue the Allies should have just starved them out instead…

    Maybe. How many peasants do you think the most zealous military cult in history would have let die before admitting defeat?

    How much would you have spent offering mercy to an enemy that had none of their own?

    • feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I think the civilian target is hard to justify, but that ship had well and truly sailed in that war at that point, so it’s interesting that it gets singled out. Presumably because it was only two bombs, versus hundreds of thousands. Fact is, it did happen, and plenty more besides. I think we can agree none of it was ideal.

    • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      “the military launched a coup”. Really? The whole military? All against Hirohito himself. Musta been a Chad to single handedly stop the entire Japanese military from couping him.

      What you meant to say is a cadre of young officers attempted to storm some government buildings before being put down quickly by the Japanese military.

      But ya know what they say. Grain of truth and all that.

      Hey, have you ever looked into the Japanese negotiation strategy for peace against the “unconditional terms” we ended up giving them? I’ll save you the trouble, they are identical. The problem is that by refusing to negotiate and demanding unconditional surrender, you don’t care about stopping the war and saving lives. You care about making your years of jingoistic demands seem legit. We demanded unconditional surrender not because we didn’t like their terms, but because we needed to embarrass them for political points back home.

      That is not worth nuking 2 cities for.

      Imagine killing two urban centers worth of civilians for the sole purpose of proving a point. Scum.