This is a genuine question. There's probably an explanation for this I haven't thought of, but it just occurred to me and I thought I'd post it here. I'm sure a central reason would be that Japan was going to surrender, while Germany wasn't at the time.
Terror bombing, whether it was with atomic or traditional bombs, is at best questionable in its effectiveness. The part of the Allied bombing of the nazis that was aimed at damaging morale was probably a mistake, and should be criticized as such, but at least the aim was to defeat the nazis. The atomic bombing of Japan was killing cities full of civilians to make the Japanese surrender to the Americans instead of negotiating surrender through the Soviets. The aim was the imperialist subjugation of Japan by the USA, not ending the war.
There were war crimes committed against Germany and they were bad. Killing civilians doesn't do shit because fascists don't care about their own civilians. It's just kinda sus if someone is overly concerned with those specific instances.
Yeah it's definitely used as an anticommunist dogwhistle a lot
Shaun: Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki
If you haven't watched it already it is easily one of the best lectures on YT ever made.
He deals exactly with the topic of terror bombing aka "strategic bombing" in WW2. link
I think I started watching it when it came out but never returned to it. Thanks for reminding me!
the bombing of nazi germany was a war crime, as was the firebombing of japan. sometimes you gotta do war crimes to make an enemy to concede defeat, and there's no tactic that shouldn't be used, if necessary, to defeat fascism.
atomic bombs were completely unnecessary though, and they were used to scare the ussr not to make japan capitulate.
Both are war crimes. One was just done with a fancy whizz bang device while the other one was done the old fashioned way.
Arial bombardment like that wasn't even an old fashioned way at that point. They went from taking pot shots at cities from one stupidly large cannon to having engineers invent a way to make a single flame cover an entire city between ww 1 and 2.
Tokyo was also firebombed as bad as Dresden (I think about 100k civilians killed). It's also a war crime. But the atomic bomb is the atomic bomb. The US wanted to play up the terror to intimidate the USSR. The US conversely wanted to downplay the other was crimes because unlike the A-bomb, it doesn't serve a propaganda purpose.
I never really thought of the implications of the weapon used being an atomic bomb.
You don't. Strategic bombing like what happened at Dresden and elsewhere has always had a minimal impact on a country's ability to manufacture war materiel while killing hosts of innocent civilians. We figured this out partway through WW2 and instead of backing off to save innocent lives and save our bombs for the battlefield we decided to double down and invest extremely heavily in the tactic anyway, blowing up marginally more useful targets and killing scores more in the process.
I have a slightly biased view on it as it happening when it did got a relative of mine released from a Japanese death camp
The only point of nuance is the fact that Japan was still actively committing genocide at the time and it did end that slightly faster than may have happened if they had waited for formal surrender but the US didn't care about that and the reason was simply to prevent them negotiating with the soviets.
