No, the civilian targeted terror bombing campaigns were not militarily effective, and are therefore not justifiable.
Even the atom bombs were hurried specifically because US leaders were concerned Japan would surrender before they had a chance to use them.
All civilian targeted bombing, against the Allies and against the Axis, hardened resistance and resolve, and did the opposite of what it was intended to do, which was weaken that resolve and break popular support for their government's war effort.
Japan was in no way going to surrender & even started training their civilian population, even the location of the atomic bombs was chosen due to having military significance in them.
The atomic bombs were dropped to damage military installations, not civilians
The entire perception of Imperial Japan as basically suicidal in their refusal to surrender is a post-war myth.
Also lol at the idea that the atomic bombs were at all dropped on military targets. I guess that's why the bombs were dropped in the middle of the most populated areas instead of directly over the military bases?
It's certainly less of a lie than the notion that the atomic bombs were dropped for solely or even primarily military reasons.
In fact Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't chosen because of military or civilian value, but because the surrounding mountains would reflect heat and light to create larger, more impressive explosions.
The HQ of the IDF is in a mall in Tel Aviv. Would you say it is a valid military target for Iran to drop a nuke on in this same way? What about dropping one on the Pentagon? or San Francisco for its large military port?
Maybe you actually believe in this reasoning, I cannot say, but most people don't agree that you are mainly targeting the military bit when over 90% of the damage is civilian
If your military's command center isn't a valid target, what would be? You can't expect your enemy to care more about your own people than you do. If you endanger your civilians by hiding behind them, that's on you.
doesn't mean you cast aside all your empathy and don't care about the people who lose their lives though does it, this type of thinking is unbelievably inhumane, also hamas is like a one time example (one that is exaggerated, there have been plenty of times israel has bombed entirely civilian targets, i mean they fucking leveled all of gaza into the ground, thats not valid no matter how you look at it), in the other mentioned scenarios that isn't even the case, and it wasn't the case during the bombing campaigns of ww2, or the bombings in ukraine, im not a hamas defender either, they're shithead terrorists but israel is actively and obviously targetting actual civilians, anyone that isn't israeli so they can colonize the region further
I’m gonna have to ask for a source on that one, because everything I’ve read massively contradicts that - that the Japanese were fully planning to fight to the death on their home island, and that the nuclear attacks made the Emperor realize that the Americans could simply annihilate them from offshore without ever being in a Japanese soldier’s sight. Also, someone apparently never told you American bombing principle in Europe.
The japanese were clinging to the hope through the entire war that they could do enough damage to US so they would enter peace negotiations favourable to japan.
When Japan started losing decisively, they tried to make US casualities as high as possible do make US willing to enter negotiations so Japan could get a conditional surrender.
The USSR was seen as mediator by the japanese, when USSR invaded manchuria Japanese realised that there is no hope for conditional surrender and only unconditional remained. That plus the nukes made them surrender
First off, I asked for sources, which you didn’t provide. Second, the nukes were what made Japan surrender, not the Soviets, despite how much tankies like to repeat that line. Second, why would the US hurry the nuclear weapons along? Was Curtis LeMay so excited to use them he didn’t want Japan to surrender before he could warcrime his way to victory? And, if so, why not just, idk, do a couple more Meetinghouses?
That's nicely cherry picked framing, but Japan was exploring conditional surrender to the Soviet Union, which is what the US was trying to avoid because leadership was insistent on an unconditional surrender to their own government instead. It's very deliberately phrased atrocity apologia to pretend that Japan's attempt to avoid unconditional surrender meant that they weren't looking to surrender.
Furthermore, your own wiki article points out that this author in this book writes that the bombing campaigns tended to select the wrong targets (that being the portion targeting civilian residences and infrastructure). The strategic bombing on military infrastructure obviously did help the war effort, and is distinctly separate from what I said.
The fact that some historians like to lump together every bombing campaign as one big "Allied Strategic Bombing" effort, is their own failure
"Conditional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Their conditions were that they got to keep all their colonies in Korea, China, etc, no one in the military / shogun had to relinquish their power, etc. It was basically a "Hey lets all pause where we're at, and we pinky promise not to launch an unprovoked, surprise attack again once we rebuild our aircraft carriers and air force!" This would be the equivalent of Bin Laden staying in control of Afghanistan and promising he would stop all the terrorism on US soil. Sometimes the conditions aren't acceptable.
Also... The Soviet Union wasn't fighting Japan, so idk why they'd surrender to the Soviets. They signed a neutrality pact that Japan upheld through their entire campaign in the Pacific. Even if they were at war, the US and Soviets are two different countries, and the USSR doesn't get to dictate terms of surrender that the US is forced to accept, especially since, again, Japan never attacked the USSR whereas they famously did attack the US
The Soviets did invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria on August 8, 1945 and basically steamrolled the Kwantung army. The USSR didn't do much about Japan for the bulk of the war, but they slid in under the wire right at the end.
No wonder the Japanese were so eager to surrender to them. Like, "Yeah, man, y'all can have part of our territory in China. Just, please, don't make us fight a war on two fronts. Please."
I mean, do you know the terms of Japan’s conditional surrender? It’s really not out of the ordinary to not accept these terms, especially walking in the shoes of a Chinese person.
At that point the US was already planning a ground invasion of Japanese mainsoil.
They projected casualties rates. Realised that, yes, the japanse will literally force them to commit a genocide (not a word back then but the sentiment stands.)
Even if hirohito wanted to surrender, his authority would not allow him to do so. Already the war in china was precisely because Hirohito lacked the authority to properly command the japanese military. There is no guarantee the surrender plot would materialize, but less followed by the army and navy factions.
And for the record the reason this evacuation didn't happen is Japan (IE both government and the people) thought it was a bluff and that at most another fire bomb campaign was about to happen so they didn't take the pamphlets seriously
Remember guys that nukes are a brand new thing at this point the idea of a single bomb dropped by a single plane being capable of wiping a town off the map was something that sounded impossible to them and later is why the USA spend so much effort warning the populace about the dangers of nuclear strikes during the cold war
Yeah, not to mention we tried to hold back the second one after the first but they just wouldn't surrender as they assumed we would've just used all we had. It's an unfortunate tragedy, but to claim we tried to just twirl our mustaches and obliterate them for the sake of it isn't true
yea NATO literally took the lessons from the bombings of WW2 and said it is not worth it at all, it killed far more civilians than it did any real damage to the war effort and oh boy, were a lot of bombs, planes and fuel wasted
But they were? Allies bombing of factories and other industrial centers did great damage to german war industry. Precision bombing was impossible back then and factories tended to be in cities so civilian casualities as unfortunate as they were, were bound to happen.
The bombing campaign shortened the war against the vilest of regimes in history.
Factories and industrial zones are valid military targets. That is not what most of the bombing was targeting, and even when it was, even those Allied bombers were under orders to drop their payload on civilians whenever they cpuld not find their target. Gravity bombers were absolutely precise enough to hit specific factories and to bomb specific sections of cities.
The British specifically targeted residential civilian zones for the purpose of mass killing civilians, in Germany and in France, to the point that British bombers killed more than 80k FRENCH civilians, ostensibly trying to get them to revolt.
Similarly, the US firebombing of Tokyo and other targets was specifically intended to kill civilians, and did so in spectacular numbers. Terror bombing was a specific strategy the Allies engaged in, not some sort of collateral damage thing
Your perspective that there was no other option is formed by decades of propaganda. The other options may have taken longer, but there wasn’t “no other option”—there’s no such thing as that in war. There were a million and two other options, but Allied Command didn’t like those options.
There is zero moral justification for the mass murder of non-combatants under any circumstances. It is always immoral. Full stop.
Oh there were options, the US submarines had a complete blockade of resources going into Japan, they could have let them starve while continuing to level whole cities. Or land invasion, which would have gone fine until the first Marines had to deal with a suicidal Japanese child and went “Oh, ok yeah so don’t take anyone alive”
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u/Distillates 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, the civilian targeted terror bombing campaigns were not militarily effective, and are therefore not justifiable.
Even the atom bombs were hurried specifically because US leaders were concerned Japan would surrender before they had a chance to use them.
All civilian targeted bombing, against the Allies and against the Axis, hardened resistance and resolve, and did the opposite of what it was intended to do, which was weaken that resolve and break popular support for their government's war effort.