Atomic bombs weren't needed to end WWII. We've been misled for 80 years
Eighty years on, these appalling tragedies demonstrate how nations that begin conflicts as champions of the rules of war can, without intending to do so, end up justifying the mass killing of innocent civilians. In that, they offer unheeded lessons about the geopolitical violence raging today.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a tragic story for our times. The commonly understood justification for dropping the atom bombs was that they ended World War II and saved countless Allied lives by negating the need to invade the Japanese home islands.
Given the Japanese surrendered on 15 August – just nine days after the Hiroshima attack – it's easy to claim the bombs worked. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after the fact, therefore caused by the fact). But it wasn't quite that simple.
At that point in the war, Japan was already effectively beaten. It was strangled by a naval blockade, its navy and air force had been annihilated, its industries were without raw materials, its soldiers and civilians were starving, and its cities were being burnt to the ground one by one.
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From late in 1944 onwards, American B29 bombers began pounding Japan. The original intention was to use precision bombing to attack military and industrial targets only, but sundry unforeseen difficulties made this impractical. The proponents of more brutal means, who were determined for revenge on the Pearl Harbour attack, won out; it was decided to burn Japan's highly flammable wooden cities to the ground by dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs – essentially huge canisters of napalm.
One by one, 60 of Japan's largely undefended cities were torched. The worst raid, in Tokyo on March 8, 1945, saw between 80,000 and 104,500 people burn to death. Across the country, 267,000 people were killed in the firebombing campaign.
The immediate post-war bombing surveys concluded that while the atom bombs sped up Japan's surrender, a surrender was inevitable without them. Most present day historians agree.
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