[Byrns]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

I don't know what this posters main malfunction is, he's not debating, he's yelling like an angry old man shaking his fist angrily at the bright yellow god in the sky.

Its easy to pull out later analysis and critic decisions based on what you know 5 or 10 or 50 years after a decision is made because frankly you have a lot more information at that time then the decision makers had in their time, thus you can revise the debate based on information that wasn't available at the time.

First and foremost, you look at the conduct of Japan and how they fought the war, and the decision that Japan would become a meat grinder for an American invasion. America couldn't afford to lose the rest of their next generation of young men, and the American public wouldn't have supported the kind of death toll that a seaborne invasion would have had.

The Japanese High Command were basically exhorting the death of their own society instead of surrender as it was it took two bombs to finally give the Emperor enough influence to push for peace over the Hawks in Japan.

The unconditional surrender had to happen, the government had to be replaced, because frankly the whole honor system that Japan existed in and fought with especially in WW2 was horrific and caused massive war crimes.

you also had Stalin in the east who suddenly didn't have a war to fight in Germany that was already looking at snatching territories in Japan and China, we were headed towards and open war with Russia.

Yes the nuking of Japan is and was tragic, but at the end of the day, Japan wanted surrender and talked about surrender with the Allies on their terms, and it had already been agreed upon by the Allies that it was unconditional surrender and the destruction of the Japanese government.

War is never pretty, its easy to look back on those battles and decisions and criticize them, but again, we have a fuller basket of information to critic those decisions.

As well don't bring up what Japanese professors were teaching in terms of WW2 unless you're willing to admit that it took Japan a long time to even talk about or apologize for the conduct of their military in the field or their treatment of prisoners and woman captives. Japan was very good at playing the victim card with their own people for a long time.

The Allies begged Stalin to join the war against Japan at the Yalta conference, and they offered up a bunch of territory as a reward.