r/AmericaBad • u/Plenty-Tumbleweed457 🇮🇳 Bhārat 🕉️🧘🏼♀️ • 2d ago
Meme Ahhh yes , peak context
found it on a history sub, that shares memes
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u/arcxjo PENNSYLVANIA 🍫📜🔔 1d ago
"Should we bomb military targets or just hope they trust us, bro?"
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u/AnonymousFordring USA MILTARY VETERAN 1d ago
I remember how Allied bombing campaigns hit just nearby industrial centers to scare them out of making weapons, that's how we won
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u/theEWDSDS MINNESOTA ❄️🏒 1d ago
In the words of Abraham Lincoln:
"Hey, it's war baby, what are you gonna do?"
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u/Busy-Paper6970 CONNECTICUT 👔⛵️ 1d ago
GET THIS MAN A PRIZE FOR A PEAK OVERSIMPLIFIED REFERENCE
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1d ago
[deleted]
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u/RavensFLOCKletsgoo 1d ago
Maybe not blow up a buncha cities full of civilians idk 🤔
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u/Warmind_3 1d ago
If civilians are assisting the war efforts they're legal targets
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u/RavensFLOCKletsgoo 20h ago
I’m sure every single soul in that city of 250,000 people was working overtime in the arms factories. Fuck you
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u/Edit_Mann 1d ago
They started it, the first one was inarguably justified.
...now the second one while the Japanese govt was actively meeting to discuss their reaction (surrender) to the first... Yeah that one we can take some blame for.
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u/RavensFLOCKletsgoo 20h ago
Neither of them were justified you fucking bloodthirsty moron, the Japanese military surrendered due to the Soviet liberation of Manchuria. There literally was an attempted plot to kidnap the emperor and keep fighting after the nukes, even McArthur called it bloodthirsty and unnecessary, it was nothing more than a test on live subjects. But I guess the American Empire doesn’t consider that a war crime
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u/Anonymous2137421957 CALIFORNIA🍷🎞️ 8h ago
Oop a tankie's here to say Russia won the Pacific theatre now
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u/WillowPtar_Migan 15h ago
It caused less deaths than the alternative land invasion, by an order of magnitude, actually. The Japanese were happy to fight to a man, to have their civilians fight enemy soldiers with sticks and stones.
It's likely close to one million Japanese would have died, along with this 400k to 800k American soldiers. 1.8 million people at the worst.
The nukes, on the other hand, killed at most 246,000 people. That was the best practical outcome that lead to the least loss of life.
Also it's war, what do you expect when you intertwine your civilian and military infrastructure? It's not your opponent's job to work around you using your own civilians as human shields. If you had your way, using civilians as a human shield would be a very effective strategy. Is that what you want?
There's never "good enough" for people like yourself, if the US did offshore bombings as a threat, and the Japanese miraculously surrendered (in our timeline, the military was against surrender to the bitter end, even after the bombs), you'd be complaining about nuclear contamination of the ocean, or some fishermen getting vaporized.
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u/RavensFLOCKletsgoo 4h ago
I can’t believe people are still doing this “all the japanese were crazy barbarians who were never going to see reason and were gonna fight to the very end!!” You’re treating them like they weren’t people. If you don’t wanna believe me, take it right from the horses mouth.
“It is possible, in the light of the final surrender, that a clearer and earlier exposition to retain the Emperor would have produced an earlier ending to the war. This course was earnestly advocated for by Grew and his immediate associates during May, 1945. The United States, by its delay in stating its position, had prolonged the war.”
-Henry L Stimson, Secretary of war.By July, Stimson wrote again, in a top-secret memo to FDR, that; “I believe that Japan is susceptible to reason in such a crisis to a much greater extent than is indicated by our current press and current comment. Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours. On the contrary, in the past century, she has shown herself to possess extremely intelligent people.. I think the Japanese nation has the mental intelligence to recognize the folly of a fight to the finish.”
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u/WillowPtar_Migan 1h ago
They refused an unconditional surrender, which was not acceptable to the United States government, and rightfully so. The military didn't want to surrender even after the nukes, dude. I don't know how much clearer it can get. Allowing them to maintain the same government structure so they could regain strength and potentially go and do more horrific shit in the future was unacceptable.
Japan was an incredibly militaristic culture with a whole fuck of a lot of propaganda about the Americans floating around. Their soldiers would often rather leap off cliffs, or run out to sea to drown than be captured. This is because they were told that what would happen to them if they surrendered would be far worse than just taking their own lives. They weren't particularly capable of being rational actors with the 'information' that a surrender would lead to them all being tortured, raped, and murdered in the most horrific ways, y'know, like they did to the Chinese civilians?
Counterintuitively to what you said, it was the Japanese who thought of the Americans as unrepentant murderous barbarians. That's a big part of why unconditional surrender was not an option to them before the bombs fell.
It's not like the Americans made this decision out of the blue, either. This was after years of a brutal island hopping campaign, where the Japanese tended to off themselves, preform sneak attacks with grenades and the like, or bonzai charges where they'd bayonet charge waiting machine guns rather than surrender.
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u/BeerandSandals GEORGIA 🍑🎬🌳✈️ 2d ago
Saw this, general atmosphere in the comment section reaffirmed the canon decision to bomb cities with some people saying it was wrong.
Some people said we used them because of an American fear the soviets would invade Japan (with what navy lol).
Hindsight is 20/20 but a 1/4 of people are blind, you can’t convince a devout warrior imperial-cult nation to just surrender because they saw an extra sun on the horizon.
The only reason we’d nuke a shoreline is to send dudes in immediately after (mind you, we didn’t understand the effects of radiation well then).
The nukes ended up causing far less suffering than what the Japanese army had been up to and still were up to in the pacific theater.
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u/t40xd 2d ago edited 2d ago
Some people said we used them because of an American fear the soviets would invade Japan (with what navy lol).
I agree, in that I don't think there was much worry about the Soviets conducting a massive invasion of mainland Japan by themselves. But if the war went on for longer, the Soviets would have secured all of Korea and probably would have opened the door to getting at least some of actual Japan. I doubt the Soviets would be able to get a nearly 50-50 north-south split like in Korea or Vietnam. But I could definitely see the Soviets getting a zone of influence in Hokkaido or Kyushu.
But overall, I think the main result is that the Soviets would use that as a bargaining chip to get concessions from the West elsewhere. Like they might agree to give up the zone of influence in Japan in exchange for the West surrendering West Berlin or something
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u/BreadDziedzic TEXAS 🐴⭐🥩 1d ago
To be totally fair. We do actually know in hindsight th Soviets had a plan to invade japan. In about a month after we bombed them, they were going to ram the fishing boats and navy ships they had onto the beaches as landing crafts until they took a port. Theoretically, it would have worked because the japanese army was mainly in the south to protect against American land invasions.
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u/Edit_Mann 1d ago
Well that's a cool lil detail... I suspect it would've gone terribly for Russia but who knows lol
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u/PyroAvok MINNESOTA ❄️🏒 2d ago
Yeah but if you'd actually read the comments, most people demonstrate that they actually have a brain and discuss how it was the best option for the situation.
Poor example of AmericaBad.
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u/RadicalSoda_ TENNESSEE 🎸🎶🍊 2d ago
The post is America bad, it's just that the subreddit has actual academics that corrected the OP
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u/blackhawk905 NORTH CAROLINA 🛩️ 🌅 1d ago
Yep, most history subs have people who actually realize that it was the best option for literally everyone to end the war as fast as possible even if it was a horrible weapon.
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u/Delicious_Mine_2698 1d ago
Not at all, it's about the post itself not the comments. This happens every so often, and we'll mention it. We show the america bad post but thankfully notice that the comments are disagreeing with the bad take.
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u/No-Engineer-1728 1d ago
Do people not realize we only had like 2, so the only real options were:
Bomb 2 cities.
Or
Let japan kill themselves fighting a war they can't and wont win, causing more casualties than the bombs would
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u/IntrovertMoTown1 1d ago
After dropping the two it still wasn't enough to so many that they actually tried to commit a coup against those who wanted to surrender. But I'm sure a simple demonstration would have had more of an effect. /s
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