Are the Americans taught at school that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary?

Question

I never heard so much justification of the atomic bombings in Japan until I started meeting more Americans. I'm surprised by the amount of people who believe that it was necessary. I'm sorry to hear that people think it was necessary to kill so many civilians, which also happened to include Koreans that had nothing to do with any aggression against the U.S.

Those atomic bombings can never be justified.

I think it helps explain why the U.S. is so paranoid about other countries having nukes. The U.S. is the only country to have actually used them to cause mass suffering. They're only afraid of getting back what they've done to others.

Answer 1

In any decent high school history class, the class would usually have a chance to debate this issue. Granted the debate might be skewed toward justifying Truman's decision, but usually kids who are paying attention will at least hear both sides.

Obviously some of those who answered below were not paying attention to the debate on this issue. They are also not really trying to answer your question, only to justify the US decision. There are of course justifications for what Truman did, but there is also a respectable body of opinion that says that the US might have succeeded in getting Japan to surrender by some kind of demonstration of the atom bomb. The question is worth debating, and both sides of the argument should be listened to respectfully.

Answer 2

Yes, although I do question it. The idea was that an invasion of Japan might cost 1,000,000 U.S. casualties and 20 times that in Japanese casualties.

But as I understand it the Japanese agreed to the same terms before the bombs were dropped as they agreed to after the bombs were dropped.

Also believe the bombs were dropped as a warning to the Russians who had also just declared war on Japan and were prepared to launch their own invasion from the north. We might have wound up with a North and South Japan just like Korea.

As for suffering and death. The fire bombing of Dresden in Germany by the British, and the fire bombing of Tokyo by the Americans I believe caused more deaths than either of the atomic bombs.

They both could have surrendered before the bombs were dropped they always had that option.

Answer 3

The way President Truman justified dropping atom bombs on Japan is because his military advisors thought that an invasion of the main land would cost a quarter million american casualties (at least). He knew americans would not stand for that. Ultimately, It's not american's fault, Japan was wrong in starting a war. I feel sorry for the generations of Japanese who suffered, but such is the nature of war.

Answer 4

I am very sorry to say that in high school American history is always glorified. thats why u will always hear here that the bombing was neccessary...however, in my college i was given a totally different perspective on this. my teacher was honest with us. she told us the truth. i am from another country where this day( the day when the atomic bomb fell on japan) has been taken as one of the most mournful day in the history of the world.

Answer 5

So I'm from another country too, but i was raised here for half of my life. No we are not taught that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. we are just taught of it as it was at that time, for America to be worried about other countries. now what ppl get from it is their own opinion.

Answer 6

It was deemed necessary at the time. It was calculated that an invasion of the Japanese home Island would have cost a million lives.

Answer 7

You keep bouncing back and forth between asserting that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were either unnecessary or unjustified or both, and in any case were unjustifiable. None of those words is appropriate.

First, by the spring of 1945, the Japanese had run out of options and had begun to resort in earnest to the use of kamikaze attacks by Japanese land-based and carrier-based aircraft on United States warships. The toll on our Navy became devastating almost overnight.

Second, the number of United States military war dead in World War II in all theaters for the entire period that the United States was in the war both in Europe and the Pacific was somewhere in the range of 330,000. It was estimated that three times that many American soldiers, sailors, and airmen would be lost if an invasion of the Japanese home islands had to be carried out. Unnecessary? Unjustified? Unjustifiable?

I don't believe that either President Truman or a single American solder, sailor, airman, or civilian worker felt the slightest need to justify it to anyone or to make any apology for the president's decision at that point to end the war quickly and decisively. The American people were behind him and approved unconditionally his use of an available weapon of war that had the effect of forcing Emperor Hirohito at long last to make a radio address to his subjects (most of whom had never before looked upon his face or heard his voice) and tell them that the time had come when it would be necessary for him and his subjects to "endure the unendurable." Unless they were driven to the brink of the abyss of total annihilation, every Japanese citizen, whether military or civilian, would have fought to the death.

World War II was by definition a world war, a new kind of war of which the world had had but a taste in World War I. World War II was fought between whole nations, not just their armies, navies, and air forces. Nobody was left out. Everybody was put at risk. The defense workers in the war plants of all combatant nations were just as much at the throats of the workers in the enemy's war plants as were the soldiers of all combatant nations at each others' throats on the field of battle. In total war, nobody is innocent and nobody is uninvolved. And that is what was going on: total war. Reflect on it.

In about 1950 I worked on a construction job with a man who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese after the fall of Corregidor and had survived the Bataan Death March and another three years in a Japanese POW camp. He was emaciated in the extreme and showed every sign of remaining that way for the rest of his life, which didn't look as if it was going to last very long. He told me, speaking of the Koreans, that they had been impressed into the Japanese armed forces and had been deployed extensively as guards at the POW camps. He said that they were infinitely more brutal than the Japanese themselves, which was hard to believe.

I mean less disrespect than you deserve, but I must tell you that I have nothing but contempt for your ankle-biting second-guessing. I feel no need to justify to you or to anyone else anything about the American conduct of World War II. If you don't like the way it was handled by the people who had to handle it, then, as the British say, hard cheese.

The references in your question to "the Americans," and to "meeting more Americans," and to the U.S. being "so paranoid" and to your opinion that "they" (the Americans, meaning us) are only afraid of getting back what "they've" done to others, all lead me to believe that you, yourself, are not an American; and for that I can only be grateful.

When Winston Churchill, whose mother was an American, said that "you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing . . . after they've tried everything else," I felt that we were fair game for that kind of ribbing, and I wasn't offended in the least by it. I found your comments, on the other hand, to be quite annoying, which you may have noticed. But I do feel better now, so I've got that going for me; which is nice.

Answer 8

You would have preferred millions more die in a ground war/invasion?
Wake up & smell the coffee.