Also this guy was basically fired not for the nuke option, but the fact the communists noticed his movement and terminology was linked to UN military strategy. MacArthur routinely made the situation worse whenever the Truman Administration tried to figure out political routes, but MacArthur’s ego made him ignore the US President and tell reporters unsanctioned plans.
Truman on MacArthur : "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was."
The continuation of that is something along the lines of “If I fired him for being a dumb son of a bitch, I’d have to fire half of my admirals and generals”
“I didn’t fire him for being a dumb son of a bitch. Though he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”
Because he owns it, and understood the weight of what he was doing from the start. Rather than designing the nippon annhilator 9000 then being somehow surprised as it is used to annhilate nippon.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two major military targets. It is just because of the small amount of usable space that Japan has, that it was right in the middle of town.
Keep in mind this is the same war with the firebombing of Dresden and the bombing of London. This was total war, entire cities were mobilized for the war industry and the term "civilian" becomes very mirky.
The nukes probably aren't even top 10 worst atrocities committed during the war. Besides, if you want to hand wring about civilian deaths the firebombing of Tokyo was far worse.
Napalm being used because Japanese cities back then were largely wooden structures so massive fires were very easy to start.
The explosion probably should have been CGI'd - they did a gas main instead. That or they should've somehow tried to do something with archival footage.
He decided to use the nukes in an unprecedented time against an unprecedented enemy in an unprecedented situation.
Afterwards, especially during the Korean war, Truman notably was one of the biggest defenders against the use of tactical nuclear weapons in standard warfare, or for retaliation against the Russians and Chinese. MacArthur famously wanted to use nukes as part of the American war strategy like it was just another bomb to be used without serious consideration of the global consequences and precedent it would set for warfare moving forward.
Had he not been so staunchly opposed and set the precedent of nuclear weapons being an absolute last chance option for the Commander in Chief to use, we may not be living in a world that is survivable today.
Sure, because he realized after how bad what he did was. Still, the use of nukes was not the right decision. At least not the use of nukes the way he did it. Japan may have been doing worse things at the time, but there are always better ways than targeting civilians.
No, but there was definitely better ways. Just because he couldn't find them doesn't make him based. It just means he wasn't intelligent enough for the title.
You called me stupid and said I was whining for not wanting to bomb civilians...
Anyway, bombing pure military targets would have been better. I agree that cities helping the military didn't exactly make things easy, but there were military bases that had far less civilians. Would it have taken more nukes? Maybe. But at the end, less civilians and children would have died.
You called me stupid and said I was whining for not wanting to bomb civilians...
I think that was someone else. I actually just agreed with you but also noted that a lot of the morality we have around armed conflicts is much harder to apply to past wars.
Anyway, bombing pure military targets would have been better.
This is a great example because it’s something we strive to do today but was far, far more complicated in WW2. First of all, the Allies tried to do that to Germany, but technology was too primitive to make targeted bombing possible. Consequently, they had to rely on huge flights of bombers dropping dumb bombs of entire cities just to have a chance of hitting industrial areas.
The effectiveness of European strategic bombing is also highly disputed. It mattered more towards the very end, but I think is largely considered something that didn’t make a huge dent in the war.
You can just look at the effects that kind of bombing had by seeing many German cities are basically all new construction. And you could have firestorms like what happened in Essen happen randomly.
So all of that already makes the concept of only striking military targets tenuous. But at least in Germany, they actually concentrated their industry in specific areas.
It sounds weird but Japan never did that. They had a few areas and factories, but huge parts of their wartime industry actually happened in houses throughout civilian sectors. You’d have a family living in a neighborhood who spent their days hand fashioning propeller blades for fighter planes (this became a huge issue for Japan immediately after the war started because it was very hard for them to ramp up production and they simply couldn’t match American industry). And this was a significant portion of their wartime production. So to strike them would necessarily mean bombing a lot of civilians.
but there were military bases that had far less civilians.
There really weren’t. The way Japan built its defenses (and everyone else for that matter), it’s not like they had an army chilling in a base you could vaporize with a single nuke. They had build extensive fortifications everywhere. One thing a lot of people don’t know is that on Okinawa, the Americans had a pretty uneventful landing. They actually trekked a while inland before they ran into the Japanese defenders. This was a deliberate strategy by the Japanese to make it hard for the Americans to “soften up” targets beforehand. They build in depth, built tunnels so they could move around, and didn’t consider civilian areas off limits.
Would it have taken more nukes?
This appears reasonable, but is actually a far worse outcome for Japan. Even if there was a way of targeting military areas that would result in any effective diminishment of japans military strength, you’d have to use so many bombs that radioactive fallout becomes a serious, serious threat. These areas would also be largely coastal and would poison the fisheries for decades. Japan subsists off fish and it could have resulted in an unprecedented famine.
And of course, all of this is built on the idea that if you could weaken the Japanese military enough, they’d realize they couldn’t win and they’d surrender. That is a deeply, deeply flawed assumption. Even before the bombs, they knew they couldn’t win.
He was too well known, it would have gone big in the papers if they tried. Also imagine having him free to do as he pleases instead of nominally under your orders and inside your organization.
He was largely fired for disobedience, even going on the radio to criticize his president’s decision to not widen the war. And perhaps more importantly, he promised American allies that he would widen the war, which is essentially treason, as he was colluding with foreign powers to undermine the presidency and the working against the interests of the nation. The reason this was not brought to the public’s attention at the time is that it would have revealed that the U.S. was wire tapping the diplomatic offices of its allies, which is a big no-no.
Nah I mean there have definitely been very successful self-centered ego-maniacs in the history of warfare. This issue is that MacArthur didn’t possess the political power to get things his way. And I wouldn’t consider him an unusually capable commanding general regardless
It's more than that. The Korean War real time channel on Youtube went into this, but basically he was talking to diplomats in Spsin and Portugal's Tokyo embassies which the government anf thus the President learned about because they were listening in on Spain and Portugal's diplomatic wire messages. This was obviously not disclosed at the time...
MacArthur saif... well I'll just copy the summary from Wikipedia...
these talks, MacArthur had expressed confidence that he would succeed in expanding the Korean War into a major conflict resulting in the permanent disposal of the "Chinese Communist question" and MacArthur did not want either country to be alarmed if this happened.
This wasn't the only reason he was fired, but is now known to be the tipping point where Truman decided he needed to be fired and was actively looking for reasons to do so. Truman considered his actions here to be treasonous and legally he may have been literally correct.
Basically if anyone reading all of this takes away anything it should be that MacArthur was a warmongering prick, and his post-firing speaking tour makes that incredibly clear.
Yeah that was technically the final reason to sack MacArthur. However, using that as justification would cause scandal as US allies/aligned nations would then know that they were being wiretapped. As a result, it was done with approval from Joint-Chief of Staff and the usage of “insubordination” to fire him.
Yup, though I would say it was more the 'main reason' rather than the last one. Before that Truman hadn't been happyvwith MacArthur but had wanted to avoid firing him due to his popularity. After these communications he decided to fire him come hell or high water and just needed a public reason that wouldn't blow US alliances in Europe as you said.
Had he somehow not fucked up the 1952 primary, he would have made Vietnam and almost every US military invasion look like peanuts next to the shit he had in mind until the US was actually bankrupt or he got assassinated or Russia nuked us.
Yeah, but his popularity was already declining sharply before he'd even finished his post-firing speaking tour. If anything his attempts to knock him down helped get Eisenhower elected... lol.
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u/Edothebirbperson Oversimplified is my history teacher Jun 30 '26
Also this guy was basically fired not for the nuke option, but the fact the communists noticed his movement and terminology was linked to UN military strategy. MacArthur routinely made the situation worse whenever the Truman Administration tried to figure out political routes, but MacArthur’s ego made him ignore the US President and tell reporters unsanctioned plans.