It is the 70th anniverssary of the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, which killed 90,000+ people on 6 August 1945 and which helped to bring World War 2 to an end. Most people alive have zero recollection of those events and those times. So now it has become fashionable for bleeding heart liberals to somehow blame America for events which the Japanese people brought upon themselves. Historic revisionism is rampant, ignoring the facts. These people have no idea whatsoever of context.

Japan started its bit of WW2 in 1931 when it expanded into China, this became a full war in 1937 and the Japanese killed 14 million Chinese people. Nearly all civilians. The Japanese were brutal and barbaric to an extent that makes ISIS look like kittens. They paid no heed to any rules of war and believed that all other races were sub human and that they should be treated like animals.

After capturing the Chinese city of Nanking, for instance, the Japanese engaged in a six week orgy of rape, murder, theft, arson, and other war crimes in which up to 300,000 citizens were killed. At least 20,000 women were raped. A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process in which soldiers would go from door to door, searching for girls, with many women being captured and gang raped. The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation or by pentetrating vaginas with bayonets, long sticks of bamboo, or other objects. Young children were not exempt from these atrocities and were cut open to allow Japanese soldiers to rape them. Meanwhile officers had competitions to see how many civilians they could kill with their swords.

Japan extended their imperialist aggression on December 7 1941 when they attacked Pearl Harbour with no warning and no declaration of war. After this they invaded many Asian countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Hong Kong, Thailand, British New Guinea, Philippines, Guam, Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor, Malaya, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Straits Settlements (Singapore), Kingdom of Sarawak, Brunei, North Borneo, Nauru, Imphal, Wake Island, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Christmas island, Attu and Kiska Islands and more. Everywhere they went they were indescribably barbaric, what we would call war crimes were their normal behaviour. The rape, torture, killing and vile mistreatment of all other human beings was how they went about their imperialist conquests. Hundreds of thousands of captured women were forced into sex slavery from 1932 onward as “comfort women” and were raped repeatedly, serving 25 to 35 men a day.

The Japanese used large numbers of captured men women and children for chemical and biological weapon research including regular vivisection without anaesthesia and testing the effects on real living people of a wide range of potential weapons. As many as a quarter of a million dying this way in just one research facility, Unit 731, between 1935 and 1945 (horrendous barbaric images click here). The weapons they developed were used widely in combat and against civilians. In Changde, China, a plague flea spraying attack killed at least 580,000 people. In 1942 dysentery, cholera and typhoid were distributed in Zhejiang Province in China.  Mustard gas and the blister agent Lewisite were regularly used in military actions. The Japanese killed many more people using WMDs than were killed in the 2 atomic bomb attacks.

The Japanese people were not the liberal society we know today. They were the products of a centuries old totalitarian feudal system in which the Emperor was a god to whom they owed everything, willingly giving their lives if asked to. Nearly 4,000 Kamikaze pilots died for the emperor. There were also suicide torpedoes (Kaiten), suicide midget submarines (Kairyu), suicide motorboats (Shinyo) and even suicide divers. This was considered normal behaviour in Imperial Japan and permeated to everyone in society.

A big part of Japanese culture was that surrender to the enemy was a huge dishonour. Officers routinely disemboweled themselves with their sword (Seppuku or Harakiri) rather than face this. Once again this attitude permeated all Japanese society. When we invaded Japan we did not invade one of the main Islands, instead going for the remote and relatively small Okinawa in the extreme South. The result was mayhem, the Japanese, military and civilians, fought to the death. Japan lost 77,166 soldiers, who were either killed or committed suicide, and the Allies suffered 14,009 deaths (with an estimated total of more than 65,000 casualties of all kinds). Simultaneously, 42,000–150,000 local civilians were killed or committed suicide, a significant proportion of the local population.

Now look at a map of Japan and see the huge job ahead of the allies if they tried to repeat this exercise up the islands. Many millions of Japanese people would have died and allied losses would have been horrendous.

To break Japan and try and force a surrender we had also subjected their cities to massive aerial bombardment.  The Operation Meetinghouse raid on Tokyo over 9–10 March 1945, for instance, was the most destructive bombing attack in all history, killing 100,000 people (more than Hiroshima or Nagasaki). Eventually more than 60 Japanese cities were destroyed by firebombing. Until the American air command concluded, by July 1945, that no viable targets remained in Japan. Yet still the Japanese Imperial government refused to give up.

The War Journal of the Japanese Imperial Headquarters stated: “We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan’s one hundred million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight”.  In May 1945 the Army staff produced a document, “The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War,” which stated that the Japanese people would fight to extinction rather than surrender. This policy was adopted by the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War on June 6 1945. On 26 July the Allies issued an ultimatum that unless Japan surrendered they would attack, causing prompt and utter destruction. The Japanese ignored this explicit warning.

So against all this background the nuclear bombs made sense. Incredible shock and awe. We only had two of them, but the Japanese did not know that. After we used the first one they refused to surrender, it was only the second one, hitting Nagasaki on 9th August, that convinced them. They thought we were going to vapourise a city every 3 days.

The nuclear bombs abruptly ended the war with Japan, saved millions of Japanese lives and large numbers of Allied military lives. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, estimated that the lives of 1,000,000 Americans and 250,000 British military had been saved by the prompt arrival of the end of hostilities. Also the bombs brought representative democracy and liberal Western values to the country. The Emperor was demoted from god to figurehead. Japan became a normal country in the international community. In the balance of evils using the bomb was the least evil thing to do.

But nearly all the Japanese war criminals were never brought to justice. Perhaps we thought that we had punished the nation enough.