This is the US foreign policy establishment’s most important publication admitting it.
Wow the account of firebombings sounds brutal. It is hard to tell who between the American leadership and the Japanese leadership had more disdain for the Japanese people.
They were horrific. The firebombings were responsible for more casualties and destruction than the atomic bombs. And neither made much difference to the course of the war. Given that these sorts of bombing campaigns serve very little military purpose i think it’s clear that they should be classified as war crimes.
Every time you look in history at this sort of thing you see the exact same thing: massive civilian toll for little to no military benefit. The Nazi Luftwaffe’s raids on London, Allied bombing raids on Germany, the firebombing of Japan, US bombing campaigns in Korea and Vietnam, now the Zionist bombing of Gaza…none of these broke the resolve or significantly degraded the military capabilities of the adversary. They are simply punitive campaigns against the civilian population.
If you want additional horror, read about the fire bombing of Hamburg. Living quarters of workers were the targets.
Anglos love to kill civilians.
Wouldn’t bombing the factory and dock workers actively manning Nazi production plants be a valid reason for targeting?
They weren’t some neutral pacifist city caught off guard by a violent attack. The firestorm occurred in neighborhoods predominantly committed to housing longshoremen building U-Boats at the docks, working civilian jobs at the port such as resupplying U-Boats, and working at the synthetic oil refineries near the docks.
Displacing those workers essentially throttled U-Boat construction in Hamburg, which otherwise would have been impossible to do since the U-Boat pens were in all effect impervious, and the workers had repeatedly and quickly repaired damage done to the refineries.
For all the evil of the anglos, I will not shed any tears over Nazi military industrial workers and their families dying. Each U-Boat those longshoremen built would kill hundreds of British, American, and Soviet sailors, and each drop of oil and petrol those refineries produced would fuel Nazi tanks and planes on their missions.
It wasn’t the Soviets declaring war. Japan was already going to surrender and had drafted full capitulation articles that they planned to present to the Allies, but the Potsdam Declaration in July was vague and not signed by the Soviet Union, which caused the radical Japanese military council members to think that it implied that the Soviets might maintain neutrality or even join their side, so they held out hope.
The Soviet declaration crushed that hope, but the Japanese were already beaten by that point. They just held out a few days later for a Hail Mary.
I suggest you read the article. Of course, Japan knew for quite some time that they had lost. They knew they would eventually have to surrender but they hoped to drag it out for a while to get better terms so that it wouldn’t have to be unconditional.
The Soviet entry into the war invalidated all remaining hopes of holding out for a better deal and it became imperative to capitulate as soon as possible.
The point of the article isn’t to say that the Soviets won that entire war, it’s to debunk the popular myth that the atomic bombs were what pushed the Japanese over the edge to capitulate when they did. The facts simply do not support that interpretation of history.
I did. And I already knew everything in it. Everyone misunderstood my point. Check my other comment.
Nowhere do I say that the atom bombs were the reason why Japan surrendered, or that the Soviets had nothing to do with the surrender. I was making a clarifying point that it was desperate political maneuvering and a misunderstanding by a limited few hardliners that kept Japan fighting for two weeks, not the immediate Soviet invasion cracking their will.
The article talks about this. It says Japan hoped that Soviet Union being neutral would help negotiate terms of conditional surrender with the allies. But Soviet Union then declaring war on Japan evaporated this possibility.
True, but I was moreso pointing out that the only people who really believed this were the holdout radicals, and two of their votes were preventing the military from issuing a capitulation order. Even Hirohito was exhausted by that point. Everyone wanted to surrender, but the tiny amount of holdout votes prevented the war from ending a few weeks earlier.
Audiobook Youtube / torrent for this : https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0-IkmzWbjoaLP3G2HGj-O5JTepm0Kjt-
Here’s another good one.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: