Atomic bombs use-a war crime?

I believe,despite the justification that use the atomic bombs save life of many american soldiers and revenge the Pearl Harbour atack,it was a war crime.Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a military garnisons(this was a reason to be atacked,because dont have a strong AA defense,and chances to atack be an succes was much bigger),and to kill instantlly thousends hundreds civilians is not too moral.Ofcourse,just the losers was judged for war crimes,but i believe the winners must be judged too,even just moral.The SU crimes was revealed,but the USA not.

Yes, and what about the bombing of Dresden, when Germany was already reduced to ashes and ruins?...

There are plenty of little known episodes too. Just an example: when Germany surrendered in May 1945, General Eisenhower (who had become the American Military Governor of the U.S. occupied area), issued strict instructions making it a crime punishable by death to feed German prisoners.

More than ten years ago, a Canadian author - James Bacque - published a controversial book based on both German and U.S. documents. The original title was "Other Losses" and it was published by Stoddard, a Canadian publishing house who took the story more seriously after it was refused by a lot of U.S.-based companies. I know both the Spanish and Portuguese editions of the book. The author describes the appaling conditions in which thousands of German POW's were forced to live, in what can only be described as makeshift camps... Through his investigation, Bacque reached incredible figures. Figures that tell a terrible story of prisioneers left to their own fate, ill-fed, sick and dying out of several diseases brought about by deficient nutrition and living conditions. The contrast between the areas run under the control of Gen. Eisenhower and those controlled by British and Canadian troops is too painful for many to withstand when they read the book, especially for veterans and older generation people who idealized Ike as an archtypical American hero. Still according to the same author, while German POW's from Commonwealth zones were quickly regaining their health, those retained by U.S. forces were dying in huge numbers (so many years after reading the book, I still have some difficulties in believing the figures, though...): ghosts in ragged clothes, with hardly a slice of bread or a rotten little potato as main course. I remember - still according to Bacque's book - that some of them were reduced to drink their own urine, while they ate wild grass and roots.
On the other hand, Gen. Patton showed a totally different, chivalrous behaviour towards his prisioners, and treated them accordingly, in a stark contrast with Eisenhower.

I do not remember the name of the citty, but in 1945 japanese citty was bombed with incendiary bombs and aprox. 200.000 of the japanese died. Maybe in the next days i come back with complementary info, and a source.

Iama

Tokyo was firebombed IIRC. The fact that the traditional Japanese building techniques involved a lot of wood and paper, helped spread the devastating fires.

Wishfull thinking. It's in the order of things that the winner "judges" the looser. Do you think someone could have judged Nazi Germany if it had won ?
As for US crimes, a lot of the morale weight disappears when your enemy commit the same acts first.

Atomics on the other hands I'm still not sure. But perhaps for mankind it's a relatively good thing that it was used once and all could measure and witness the effects. If it had remained a theoretical weapon disconnected from the underlying horror, I believe that the cold war would have been much more dangerous game.

For an act to be classified as a crime, it has to be forbidden by a law. That is why bombing Dresden was not a crime, bombing Tokyo was not a crime, and even using the A-bombs was not a crime. It's as simple as that.

Murdering in cold blood unarmed civilians should be a war crime though.

Cheers

- Should have been, you mean. Rules are much stricter today, exactly because nobody wants another Hiroshima or Tokyo or Dresden or Coventry.

I have heard of Bacque's claims before, and yes, they are controversial -- and it is not just because Americans don't like hearing bad things about Eisenhower. His claims are just not well supported:

1. The German government doesn't support them. "1 year after the last acknowledged German PoW was released by the Soviets (1956), the West German government set up the "Scientific Commission for the History of German Prisoners of War," (sometimes called the "Maschke Commission") . They spent the next 16 years tracking the fate of German PoWs in various countries, publishing their results in 22 books. They noted Western mistreatment of German PoWs in 1945, but, studying the 6 worst camps that held 560,000 PoWs, estimated deaths from 3,000-9000, in the range of 1%." (http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/for/us-germany-pow.html)

2. Eisenhower could not have done this alone. Why haven't the soldiers who carried out the policy spoken about it? Even if you say that they stayed quiet because they were worried about being prosecuted for war crimes, enough people would have seen it who were not responsibile (British, Canadian, and French troops for example). Some of them would have spoken out in the 50+ years since the war.

3. If no German POW in Eisenhower's control was being fed, under penalty of death, how did they survive? Scavenging? Eating their boots? Or is the claim that they all died?

Bacque also ignores the context in which the events took place.

1. The German civilian population was living on very short rations too. German agriculture had been relying on slave labor which was now gone. Tractors, draft animals, fertilizer, etc. -- all were gone.

2. The Germans had been very hard on civilians in the territories they had occupied. Eisenhower had seen first-hand how the Germans had treated the civilian population in Holland. This is without considering the impact of the recent liberation of the concentration camps. There was a strong desire in the US military to make the Germans face how they had treated people they had conquered.

3. Germany had lost 40% of its housing stock. Housing civilians was a problem too.

4. Germany's transport network was in ruins, which made it harder to move food to people, people to housing, etc.

5. 10+ million German civilians had fled from eastern to western Germany ahead of the Soviets.

6. The US was still at war against Japan. Moving military troops and supplies to the Pacific was going to take priority over moving food to Europe. Refugees and German civilians would have priority over POWs for what was sent.

Patton was under Eisenhower's command, so Eisenhower's orders (if in fact they were given) applied to him too.

Totally as an aside, my father did his US Army training in Oklahoma in the winter of 1944-45. All the maintenance work on the base (cutting grass, painting) was done by German POWs. Most were Afrika Korps veterans captured in Tunisia. My father thought one goal of using them was to show the new recruits that the Germans were nothing to be afraid of, but it had the opposite effect! My father was 18... right out of high school... and he thought these guys looked like warriors... physically fit, sun-tanned guys who had seen some hard campaigns. They scared the hell out of him! (He went to the Pacific, so in the end it did not matter).

The bombing of German cities was hardly "in cold blood". It happened during a war... a war which Germany had started (certainly started in British and American eyes).

Germany set a precedent for bombing of cities to terrorize the civilian population when they bombed Warsaw on 1 September 1939. This continued all through the war... the Blitz on England, and the V-1 and V-2 attacks for example. To expect the British and Americans not to use the forces they had to inflict the same -- and hopefully worse -- punishment on Germany is not realistic.

America never suffered from serious Japanese bombing, so the firebomb and nuclear attacks cannot be explained this way. However, the American military did not think that Japan placed great importance on civilian lives -- enemy or Japanese. The atrocities the Japanese committed in China were part of this. It was reinforced by the suicide of Japanese civilians on Saipan, where they jumped off a cliff rather than surrender to the Americans. After seeing the way the Japanese fought on Okinawa, everyone knew that an invasion of Japan would cause high casualties on both sides.

I am not saying this to excuse the use of the atomic bombs. I have argued this both ways. I am only trying to put it in context. Truman was using the weapons he had to save American lives, eliminate the need for a ground invasion of Japan, and win the war.

Incidentally, my father was training on Okinawa for the invasion of Japan when the war ended, so I may owe my life to the atomic bomb. (I know, one more reason not to use it, right? )

You must also remember that millions of Japanese lives were saved as well by using the atomic bombs. You have to realize that every civilian was taught to fight to the death when the U.S. invaded...

Jeff,

Bacque's book is indeed controversial. I read the Canadian edition loaned from a friend and I quoted some things from memory. But I remember quite well the stir it caused when the Portuguese and Spanish editions came out. Some reviewers weren't well informed enough, some praised his work, while others called him a revisionist. The figures reached by the author are the most incredible thing in the entire book! As for the grim details of POW life, he might have exagerated oral claims and testimonies usual in a country devasted by war and, as you pointed out, by a general lack of food supplies.
As for Patton, I am well aware that he was under Eisenhower's command. But Patton was much more sympathetic towards the defeated Germans than Eisenhower. The later had a different attitude concerning the German population, quite reinforced by the shock caused by the liberation of the concentration camps.

I have to disagree when you state that the Germans set a precedent when they bombed Warsaw on 1 September 1939. As a matter of fact, they've done plenty of that in Spain during the Civil War. And I am not only thinking of the well-known case of Guernica (or Gernika, if you use the Basque spelling). Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and other towns in Republican-held territory suffered the same horrors later to be unleashed over Warsaw. The strafing of innocent civilians was also an infamous German "speciality" that was started, so to say, during the Spanish Civil War: Málaga is one little-known case, but it deserves to be remembered. The fall of Málaga was a main turning point of the Spanish Civil War. The rebel offensive against the town, under the command of Gen. Queipo de Llano, started on 17 January 1937. After taking the fringe of Republican-held territory stretching up to Marbella, the Nationalist forces took Alhama and the surrounding area north of Málaga. The direct assault began on February 3rd. The front was ruptured and widespread panic among the civil population followed. In the meanwhile, and benefiting from the chaos dominating the Republican rear, the Nationalists managed to gain terrain at a steady pace. At the same time, the Italian mechanized forces of Gen. Roatta stationed north of Málaga marched towards the town, while the defenders under Cor. Villalba orders tried to handle the effects of lowering morale and discipline and an acute lack of supplies (the 12.000 men-strong garrison reportedly had only at his disposal some 8.000 rifles and 16 artillery pieces). The local Republican leaders and everyone else afraid of the brutal Nationalist vengeance tried to escape by fleeing along the main coastal road to Almería, just to end chased and strafed at by enemy aircraft in heaps.

As for the use of the atomic bombs, we must honestly reckon that it saved a lot of U.S. soldiers lives (and Japanese too), putting an end to the dreaded invasion of Japan. But their use was also meant as a direct warning to "Uncle Joe". Even if the Russians were well aware of what was going on at Los Alamos, the impact caused by the atomic bombings, as Chandernagore pointed out, was such that at least it served as a terrible warning of things to come...

Ruy

This post has been edited by Ruy Aballe on January 15, 2005 12:15 am

That's totally wrong and immoral.

Did i say immoral? Do you know what moral and immoral means?

So if you lived in a country were the law is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, you would see nothing wrong with that?
Oh, ..so just because it's ok to murder anybody you meet on the street, (and a law regarding that has not yet been passed in parliament), you would go and do it?

that quote by itslef is immoral!

This post has been edited by Der Maresal on January 20, 2005 04:24 am

....and maybe if we keep going like that...

then we can find a justification for the victims of the 'holocaust' as well who died in their thousands during the last months of the war when allied planes bombed railways and the country itself faced with starvation and other priorites could not longer provide these inmates with the food and healthcare they had recieved during the previous years.

I don't think i exagerate when I say that the dead that the 'allies' found when they "liberated" the work camps had died overwhelmingly from Typhos disease and mass starvation....during the last cloasing months of the war.
Can anybody prove the contrary ?

That's totally wrong and immoral.

Did i say immoral? Do you know what moral and immoral means?

Yes, I do. On the other hand, you seem to be mixing up moral/immoral with lawful/unlawful.

You stated that the use of the atom bombs was a war crime. I objected to that. If you had stated that it was an immoral act, I wouldn't have objected.

So get your terminology straight.
You want to say an act is immoral, unethical, reprehensible - go ahead and do it. We could discuss that, it's a matter of opinions, of course.
You want to say an act is a crime? Then be ready to quote the law making it a crime, otherwise you are making a fool of yourself.