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Average multiple choice question (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/historymemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

The bottom left answer is also very USA propagandish tho.
(And even at that, the USA was killing more Japanese ppl with regular & incendiary bombs per day than with nuclear bombs. The threat of the new weapon tech (unleashed on civilians for terror purposes, just like incendiary bombs), was to show the world the supremacy, not the already collapsed Japanese Empire with a few weeks left in it anyway.)

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    The Japanese Empire was not 'already collapsed', and the atomic bombings were not to 'show the world the supremacy'. Hell, the Japanese government was seriously considering continuing the fight after the first atomic bombing, and after the second bombing, still maintained a demand for conditions to their surrender and had to fight off an internal coup that wanted to continue fighting anyway.

    US command at this time considered the three options to be the atomic bombings as a Hail-Mary, or else to resort to either blockade or invasion. In the case of blockade, millions of Japanese civilian deaths were projected - in the case of invasion (which was regarded as the more likely option), over a million American casualties were projected. The Purple Hearts that were produced in anticipation of the (never-performed) invasion lasted the US the rest of the 20th century.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    The Japanese Empire was not ‘already collapsed’

    I suppose this is literally true since they still held Manchuria and other parts of China and random Pacific islands here and there that the US had bypassed, but that was really only because the bulk of their troops were trapped in these places with no capacity to bring them back to Japan. They were effectively out of oil and ships at that point. You might say that the Japanese nation was not already collapsed, but they were very obviously finished, with the only question being how long the mopping-up was going to take.

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