If Japan was firebombed to near oblivion would that have been viewed as more moral to the public than the atom bombs?

[Malone]

To this day the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is viewed controversially. I'm not here to start a debate on if it was ethical to or not. But if it wasn't the A bombs that were deployed, it would have been likely that the US/Allies would have just continued their firebombing campaigns. I think it would be feasible to imagine that a prolonged campaign could have eventually equaled or surpassed the 129,000–226,000 deaths attributed to the A bombs.

If it was that what ended be the driving factor to get Japan to surrender, then would the end of WW2 been viewed less controversial ?

 

[walmart]

Around the time of bombing and and even into the 1950s, nukes were viewed as just another really big bomb. The modern controversy around the bombing down to projecting modern nukes and attitudes backwards.

 

[Nivek]

To this day the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is viewed controversially. I'm not here to start a debate on if it was ethical to or not. But if it wasn't the A bombs that were deployed, it would have been likely that the US/Allies would have just continued their firebombing campaigns. I think it would be feasible to imagine that a prolonged campaign could have eventually equaled or surpassed the 129,000–226,000 deaths attributed to the A bombs.

If it was that what ended be the driving factor to get Japan to surrender, then would the end of WW2 been viewed less controversial ?

If Downfall happened, even the Japanese would have Wished an easy exit as otl

 

[Sekhmet_D]

If it was that what ended be the driving factor to get Japan to surrender, then would the end of WW2 been viewed less controversial ?

Probably.

The modern trend is to view nuclear weapons as uniquely dangerous and uniquely cruel, whereas the fact is that a good number of the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered less than those who were killed during Operation Meetinghouse.

 

[thomas raven]

There's a bunch of factors involved depending on where the POD is, too. Do the Allies have the bomb and decide not to use it? Are there no nukes? Does Russia split the atom first?

I think the nuke was uniquely horrific and traumatizing, at least to an extent - look at the effect it had on Japanese pop culture - but it's difficult to fully disentangle that particular trauma from the trauma of everything else that happened in the war, or simultaneously the trauma of having their empire forcibly stripped away by foreign adversaries.

While I'm not an expert, I definitely agree that the controversy over Hiroshima-Nagasaki took a long time to grow into its present status. I'd estimate (again, without any expertise) that two of the major factors were (1) the above-mentioned expression of nuclear trauma in Japanese pop culture works like Godzilla and Barefoot Gen, and those works over time finding an audience in the west, and (2) the specter of nuclear holocaust hanging over everyone's heads during the cold war, making American citizens really conscious of 'oh shit, these nuke things are frikkin terrifying, huh?'.

(Actually, the latter part (in the US, at least) is probably tied in a lot with the peace movement, the hippie movement, the rise of environmentalism... and a lot of that's also tied in with Vietnam and all the shady shit the US military was getting up to overseas throughout the cold war, so that's even more dependent on which way the butterflies fly.)

In a hypothetical timeline where nukes were never used on Japan, I'd guess that there would be less controversy in alt!2023 upon the same-day release of... IDK, Raggedy Ann and Eisenhower, but it'd probably still be a controversial topic in the ATL. The major unknown factors are how much Japanese society is still traumatized by losing the war and their empire, how and how much that gets expressed in their pop culture over the following years and decades, whether Japanese pop culture gets spread over to the west and finds an audience there like it did IOTL, and how the entire cold war plays out in this other universe.

 

[muskeg13]

To this day the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is viewed controversially. I'm not here to start a debate on if it was ethical to or not. But if it wasn't the A bombs that were deployed, it would have been likely that the US/Allies would have just continued their firebombing campaigns. I think it would be feasible to imagine that a prolonged campaign could have eventually equaled or surpassed the 129,000–226,000 deaths attributed to the A bombs.

If it was that what ended be the driving factor to get Japan to surrender, then would the end of WW2 been viewed less controversial ?

Here's where I think you erred. Instead of "To this day the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is viewed controversially," you should have said, "Today the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is viewed controversially."

In August 1945, and for a long time thereafter, the decision to drop the bombs and bring the most brutal and costly war in world history to an abrupt end wasn't controversial at all. It was actually logical, humane and long overdue.

 

[Supreme]

No, remember Dresden and Hamburg

 

[Asian Jumbo]

The deliberate starvation of the (civilian) population caused by the blockade combined with the bombing of any & all infrastructure would probably be even more controversial than the firebombing raids themselves

 

[Sam R.]

When I meet someone who complains about Turnip Winter or Bengali Shipping spontaneously, then I'll believe the 1946 Japanese calorie intake incident would cause outrage. The historiography of "The Holodomor" is in itself interesting, not only because the Captive Nations lobby played a very long game, a game longer than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy makes out; but, because the generation of a national trauma for political effect took 70 years and endless lobbying. It take 70s years of an offended moderately well funded right wing nationalist community to embed a public knowledge, and then it only has succeeded in the last 20 years for current event reasons.

American views of the Atomic Bombing of Japan centre on the uniqueness of the bomb, the uniqueness of Americans, and explain something about potential Soviet nuclear apocalypse 1960-1990. Nobody gave a rats arse about firebombing outside of communist peacenik and grognard*1 communities until anime got big in the West and people suddenly needed to understand LOGH. People *still* don't talk about where the Occupation of Japan influenced anime: aborted babies in train-station lockers doesn't animate like our guilt over our potential annihilation by soviet air power.

Turnip Winter. Bengali logistics. Ask a serious communist historian who isn't a tankie to explain why the Ural-Siberian methods of collectivisation only resulted in actually serious famines in two areas. Nobody will bother to remember starving Japan to death by submarine and naval aviation.

yours,
Sam R.

*1 I'd suggest that both communities have a common attention to detail, at least from the members of both communities I meet here who are very good at treating the history of imagination and the history of what happened as separate but both respectable.

 

[CaptainCalvert]

You could argue that OTL Japan was firebombed (and isolated and starved) to destruction. The two A bombs were each about as destructive as firebombings, but they required much less effort to deliver and took away all hope of glorious defiance [1]. And the use of both uranium and plutonium bombs sent the message 'we can do this pretty much every week now'.

[1] destruction of the Kwantung army and the prospect of baby-eating soviet hordes overrunning Japan were contributing factors.

 

[Dorknought]

Not firebombing, targeting the railways was the next option:

From: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-strategic-options-against-japan-1945

Because it was still in progress, Americans had not yet learned that Japan’s 1945 rice crop was collapsing. About half the population of Japan lived in a dire food deficit area south and west of Tokyo on Honshu. The coastal shipping that normally provided the backbone of Japanese internal transportation had been destroyed. The only alternative to movement of large quantities of rice from surplus to deficit areas was by the limited rail system. If the US knocked out the rail system, Japan would be locked on a course for famine involving about half the 72 million population.​

​

The Japanese rail system was, by US or European standards, both weak and extremely vulnerable. Combining the rail bombing, blockade and the failure of the 1945 rice crop promised to threaten death by starvation to a large swath of the Japanese population. Even though the war ended before the rail system was devastated, the extremely diminished rice supply available for the period through to November 1946, generated a massive depopulation of Japan’s urban centers.​

​

Tokyo’s inhabitants, for example, plunged from about 4.5 million at the end of 1944 to 2.5 million in mid-1946. Famine in 1946 was only forestalled by the infusion of massive amounts of US food that fed 18 million Japanese city dwellers in July, 20 million in August and 15 million in September 1946. Occupation authorities estimated this food saved 11 million Japanese lives.​

 

[Nivek]

The deliberate starvation of the (civilian) population caused by the blockade combined with the bombing of any & all infrastructure would probably be even more controversial than the firebombing raids themselves

Nah would be called military strategy

 

[Typho]

The aerial bombing of Japan is treated in a special manner, more criticized compared to when it was done to Germany, Italy or even France.

 

[Nivek]

The aerial bombing of Japan is treated in a special manner, more criticized compared to when it was done to Germany, Italy or even France.

They used propaganda for their benefit also pulling the same evil armed forced,/helpless Japanese civilians lie

 

[CalBear]

When I meet someone who complains about Turnip Winter or Bengali Shipping spontaneously, then I'll believe the 1946 Japanese calorie intake incident would cause outrage. The historiography of "The Holodomor" is in itself interesting, not only because the Captive Nations lobby played a very long game, a game longer than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy makes out; but, because the generation of a national trauma for political effect took 70 years and endless lobbying. It take 70s years of an offended moderately well funded right wing nationalist community to embed a public knowledge, and then it only has succeeded in the last 20 years for current event reasons.

American views of the Atomic Bombing of Japan centre on the uniqueness of the bomb, the uniqueness of Americans, and explain something about potential Soviet nuclear apocalypse 1960-1990. Nobody gave a rats arse about firebombing outside of communist peacenik and grognard*1 communities until anime got big in the West and people suddenly needed to understand LOGH. People *still* don't talk about where the Occupation of Japan influenced anime: aborted babies in train-station lockers doesn't animate like our guilt over our potential annihilation by soviet air power.

Turnip Winter. Bengali logistics. Ask a serious communist historian who isn't a tankie to explain why the Ural-Siberian methods of collectivisation only resulted in actually serious famines in two areas. Nobody will bother to remember starving Japan to death by submarine and naval aviation.

yours,
Sam R.

*1 I'd suggest that both communities have a common attention to detail, at least from the members of both communities I meet here who are very good at treating the history of imagination and the history of what happened as separate but both respectable.

The Holodomor was a national trauma in impacted Ukraine (and the oft forgotten area in Kazakhstan) from the day they occurred through to the present day, That the Soviet Government put extreme effort into suppressing the records of what occurred and that same government ensured that the literal Party Line on the subject was followed by making any deviation from the official story a "counter-revolutionary offense" for almost 60 years does not change that unalterable fact. That the current Russian government, long before relations took a nosedive in the mid "Noughts" also speaks volumes about what is once again being suppressed.

I'm making this a kick, for now, mainly because this sort of dismissive crap about a genocide really torques me up, and I don't want to go to the Hammer when I am hugely pissed off.

Kicked for a week.

 

[CalBear]

To this day the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is viewed controversially. I'm not here to start a debate on if it was ethical to or not. But if it wasn't the A bombs that were deployed, it would have been likely that the US/Allies would have just continued their firebombing campaigns. I think it would be feasible to imagine that a prolonged campaign could have eventually equaled or surpassed the 129,000–226,000 deaths attributed to the A bombs.

If it was that what ended be the driving factor to get Japan to surrender, then would the end of WW2 been viewed less controversial ?

Actually, if you read the "Introduction" part of AANW, I have a bit in there where the decision to block/ firebomb. strafe instade of going Nuclear is a matter of massive debate in the ATL.

 

[Mitridates the Great]

I would say that it would probably be less controversial because at least it would be perceived that there is more proportion between the effort invested and the result obtained.

The firebombing raids required hundreds of bombers to be deployed to destroy a single city. Here instead it's a plane + a bomb = a city burnt to ashes, repeat until you run out of bombs or the enemy runs out of cities (as we saw in Decisive Darkness, even if there it seemed like the US just said "Fuck it, Hitler was right, let's commit genocide, we don't care anymore if they surrender or not").

It lends itself much more to being perceived as an abuse of force that was totally unnecessary, and was done just to "get his dick out and wave it in your face."

The fact that later the information came out about the inhabitants of Japan were actually on the brink of famine and it is more likely that they would have collapsed to the minimum in case of combat (instead of the apocalyptic predictions that there would be practically a soldier heavily armed Japanese behind every rock) only made it worse, making it appear that the United States was abusing a defenseless population, in a very similar way to what they were doing in Vietnam. Something that is helped by the fact that a lot of the anti-Japanese war propaganda, well, it was mainly based on portraying all the racist stereotypes known at the time.

(Basically, I think both Vietnam and Japan got mixed up, and that's where we got the culture pop image of American soldiers as vicious white supremacists and racists, barely different from the Nazis, who gleefully went about slaughtering defenseless civilians simply because they were Asian, or at least they were not white).

Not helped that many modern bombing apologists sound suspiciously similar to white supremacists, think of that New Hampshire politician who gave the world the infamous "two bombs weren't enough" line.

 

[Mark E.]

I think there is a public perception that nukes (or atom bombs) are so terrible that conventional invasion/bombing is more "humane" even if it kills more people. Many Americans rationalize that the Bomb was justified because it brought fewer casualties than an invasion.

 

[Athelstane]

The one thing the incendiaries and the atomic bombs had in common in regards to Japan was the bomber used to deliver them: the B-29.

And in regards to the B-29...an interesting fact unearthed today:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1688327792386060288

 

[TDM]

To this day the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is viewed controversially. I'm not here to start a debate on if it was ethical to or not. But if it wasn't the A bombs that were deployed, it would have been likely that the US/Allies would have just continued their firebombing campaigns. I think it would be feasible to imagine that a prolonged campaign could have eventually equaled or surpassed the 129,000–226,000 deaths attributed to the A bombs.

If it was that what ended be the driving factor to get Japan to surrender, then would the end of WW2 been viewed less controversial ?

Honestly the controversy in public debate started afterwards, in 1945 the public is not going to care beyond which is most effective in bringing Japan to it's knees.

We'd been bombing Germany in order to among other things "de-house key industrial workers" for a couple of years, so for an idea for how attitudes might be different I'd look at attitudes towards the Bombing campaign in Germany.

Of course one big piont here is the atomic bombs are seen by many as the thing that forced Japan to stop (it's more complicated than that, lots of threads on that). But while strategic bombing of Germany may have had negative effects on Germany it never came close to forcing a surrender not even in the popular narrative. So you have to take that difference into account when comparing the actual atomic bombing of Japan to theoretical continued fire bombing campaign of Japan with Germany as the illustration

My gut feeling is the first line I posted above. At the time we (the military, the government and the public) were pretty Ok* with mass civilian casualties on the other side by bombing campaigns with the goal of ending the war or even making it easier to end. Perceptions have moved on from there post war.

And lastly the conventional bombing campaign in Japan already had higher death toll than the two atomic bombings that took place.


*this is a simplification but the concerns didn't really ever stop us doing it