Was the death toll in the atomic bombing of Japanese territory greater than was expected by the US?
Upvote:0
You are confusing the aiming point with the target city.
Hiroshima was the headquarters of the division of the Japanese Army tasked with defending Kyushu. There were more than 50,000 troops quartered in that city. It had a number of rivers which made the city unsuitable for conventional carpet bombing. There are very few T-shaped bridges in the world, making that landmark rather unique and hard to mistake with any other city.
Kokura was the primary target for the 2nd atomic bomb. Due to overcast skies, the navigator was unable to determine that they were over their target, or even over land. This city used to be called Kokura Arsenal due to the number of munitions factories.
Hiroshima was a huge natural port. Historically it was the only port open to foreigners. In the event of a conventional land invasion, it would be necessary to take and hold this port so that Allied shipping could use it to land troops and materiel. This invasion was called Operation Olympic and was scheduled for November 1, 1945.
Upvote:1
This is not a complete answer, but it's too lengthy for a comment.
Did the US indeed expect that the explosion will destroy just one factory rather than the entire city?
No, they intended to destroy the whole cities. The idea was to make an overwhelming show of force in order to accelerate a Japanese surrender and convince the Japanese to surrender unconditionally rather than conditionally. It was unclear whether the Japanese could have been forced to surrender without an invasion, which would have been very bloody. Some historians have also interpreted the bombings as a prelude to the Cold War; by using them, the U.S. gained strength in its postward struggle with the USSR to carve up the world into spheres of influence.
Was the death toll in the atomic bombing of Japanese territory greater than was expected by the US?
They certainly expected to kill a vast number of civilians, but there were a variety of factors that probably made it impossible to make accurate numerical estimates of the number of civilian deaths:
The cities had been partially depopulated because there were food shortages, and many children had been sent out into the country, where there was food. I doubt that the US had accurate information on the exact number of civilians remaining in the cities.
Many of the deaths would have been from fires as the cities burned. This seems like it would be impossible to predict.
In 1945, knowledge of the effects of radiation on humans was pretty rudimentary. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were people who survived the initial blast and were exposed to radiation. Their doses depended on factors such as how far they were from the blast. There were smaller numbers of people with larger doses, and larger numbers with smaller doses. The effects of small doses of ionizing radiation are not well understood today, and were certainly not well understood in 1945. Attempts to retroactively estimate the effects have been hampered by the fact that when a city burns, a lot of nasty carcinogens are released into the air. (This was a problem after 9/11 as well.) There is evidence that very small doses of ionizing radiation can be beneficial, an effect called radiation hormesis.
There is a paper on the radiation stuff that you can find online (in English): M. Mine et al., "Mortality of A-bomb Survivors in Nagasaki and Hiroshima."
Upvote:3
Based on a cursory reading, I don't believe the United States underestimated the death toll. The bomb itself was known to be devastating. Einstein himself petitioned the government to with hold the use of the bomb, knowing full well that the weapon was many orders of magnitude more dangerous than any sort of conventional bombing technique used up to that point.
You can see in both the crewman's account and in the Potsdam declaration, that the United States had foreseen the affect of the bombing, "utter destruction" and "utter devastation", "an act of war to end the war." The Americans knew what they were doing and they knew the death toll with be staggering. They weren't intending to hit a bridge or a road. They were trying to disable the Japanese completely. The stakes were so high that they were willing to sacrifice any number of people to end the war.
In short, no, the Americans didn't overestimate or underestimate they simply gambled that it would do what was needed. And in that at least, they were correct.
Crewman's account of the bombing
I'm going to hedge the above claim by pointing you to this. It's well sourced and seems to be relatively contradictory to my statements.
Upvote:9
Your definition of "military target" is incorrect. The entire cities WERE military targets because military installations and arms factories/storage facilities were located inside the city limits.
Quite apart from that, the policy of carpet bombing cities was well established at the time and was being performed on a daily basis by B-29s carrying conventional explosives and firebombs.
The effects of such bombing on the population were known too, at least in estimate, based on figures attained from German bombing on English cities and analysis of damage done to German cities.
So no, the expected casualty count was well known, and was not expected to be much different from using the standard system of firebombing the same cities. The reason the nuclear weapons were chosen were mainly
- psychological. A show of force. "we now can destroy an entire city with a single bomb, resistance is futile". This worked quite well, though it had been hoped a single bomb would be enough.
- military. Using fewer aircraft put fewer crews at risk, thus lower expected friendly casualties.
In addition, a surrender at this stage would stop the war before the USSR could launch a major invasion into northern Japan, AND would make the US invasion of Japan scheduled for the spring of 1946 unnecessary, preventing an estimated million US and 2-3 million Japanese casualties just from that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall has some information on casualty estimates (note, the half a million US casualties listed are deaths only, include wounded and a million is low). https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/giangrec.htm has more.
More post
- 📝 Was the Seven Years’ War the first time dogs were used to carry messages?
- 📝 Was Marie Antoinette considered a fully legitimate bride for the heir apparent to the French throne in 1770?
- 📝 Why did the US insist on invading Japan instead of blockading it in WWII?
- 📝 Was there a law forbidding kingdoms in the Holy Roman Empire?
- 📝 Could Polish people who didn't live in Poland get Polish citizenship after Poland's revival in 1918?
- 📝 What time period did these notes come from?
- 📝 Is there any data that supports or refutes the claim made in this paper about the Harappan/Indus Valley civilization?
- 📝 How widespread was practice of fusion of Graeco-Roman and barbarian names?
- 📝 How did Diego Gutiérrez know the boundaries (shape of the Americas) when he drew the 1562 Map of America
- 📝 Did French ever have any special status in Austria?
- 📝 Are there any reliable documented records of members or operations of the French Resistance during World War 2?
- 📝 How do we derive information for civilizations from periods before record keeping?
- 📝 Who was the first woman to be made a god by Rome's senate?
- 📝 How could a skilled battle commander like Napoleon Bonaparte lose to Prussians at Waterloo (Belgium) as such?
- 📝 Has a state ever "attacked" another one by printing fake money?
- 📝 Is the son of a Freedman a Freeborn?
- 📝 Did Paul Robeson wash the US flag in protest?
- 📝 Why did not US use solely (more) aviation and artillery when taking Okinawa during ww2?
- 📝 By mid-1945, was Japan capable of maintaining the war even in the absence of further direct American attacks?
- 📝 Why weren't the U.S. aircraft carriers in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?
- 📝 What Was "Courtly Love" (Amour Courtois?)
- 📝 Can anyone identify the military branch and rank of the man in the front row? This is from Germany @1932
- 📝 Why did Titanic need two steering wheels?
- 📝 Was Japan known to be a potential threat to the USA in the 10 year period prior to 1941
- 📝 Has there ever been a peaceful overthrow of a dictator or monarch?
- 📝 Colonies in Machiavelli's age
- 📝 Identify two Medieval Indian coins
- 📝 Were "hitmen" a real historical occupation?
- 📝 Why did sailing ships so often employ Chinese cooks?
- 📝 What is the dating of the earliest manuscript of the Book of Arda Wiraz?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Was the death toll in the atomic bombing of Japanese territory greater than was expected by the US?
- 📝 How was the naval battle of Guadalcanal affected by Japanese ships loading High Explosive shells rather than Armor Piercing?
- 📝 Were B-17s (rather than B-29s) ever used to bomb mainland Japanese territory during WW2 (at least before the capture of Okinawa)?
- 📝 What was the estimated malaria death toll for US Forces during World War II?
- 📝 What was the death toll during the Inquisition?
- 📝 What was the likely death toll of the Tudor invasion of ireland?
- 📝 What was the death toll of Plague of Justinian?
- 📝 What was the death toll of non-Americans in the Vietnam War?
- 📝 Why was the Council of Nicea held in Nicea rather than Rome or Constantinople?
- 📝 Why was World War I ended on Nov 11 11:00, rather than immediately upon signing the armistice?
- 📝 Why was the Japanese Army's fatalities inflicted:suffered ratio so low in the Pacific theatre?
- 📝 What do the modern Japanese people think about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
- 📝 What was the plan for an abort of the Enola Gay's mission to drop the atomic bomb?
- 📝 Why was sugar cultivation more profitable in the Caribbean/Brazil than West Africa?
- 📝 Why was Kaliningrad placed under the Russian SFSR rather than the Lithuanian SSR?
- 📝 Why was the Roman Empire considered an empire rather than a kingdom (again)?
- 📝 What were the EMP effects, if any, of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
- 📝 Was it possible for a young Japanese woman to end up enslaved in Great Britain in the mid-1600s?
- 📝 Why was the Red Army successful against the Japanese in 1939 but perform poorly against Finland 1939-40 and early part of WW2?
- 📝 Was there a Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo during WW2
- 📝 What forces/incentives drove the Mongols to conquer a much larger territory than they could comfortably settle or rule?
- 📝 Why were the Mongolian armies able to to use greater percentages of archers than (Medieval) Europeans?
- 📝 What was done to improve the safety of jousts after the death of Henry II?
- 📝 Were there any pilots that declined to carry out the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
- 📝 How was the Black Death stopped?
- 📝 During feudalism in Europe, was one's allegiance to the lord more or less important than the allegiance to the king?
- 📝 Before entering WW II, why was the US so against Japanese aggression in China but did nothing about Germany in Europe?
- 📝 Why was the Halifax death penalty reserved for thefts of at least 13½ pence?
- 📝 Was the British Empire bigger than the combined empires of the Iberian Union in terms of claimed land area?
- 📝 Toyotomi Hideyoshi threatened to exterminate all Japanese foxes unless he heard from the god Inari. What was the aftermath (if any)?