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But if you put yourself in the place of the Japanese leaders in the period preceding the strike on Hiroshima, the picture will look quite different. It is quite obvious that in terms of the scale of damage, it fits perfectly into the parameters of air raids using non-nuclear funds.įrom our point of view, Hiroshima is something that stands apart, something extraordinary. If you check the percentage of destruction in cities, then Hiroshima will be in 17th place. But if you compile a table on the number of people who died in all 68 cities as a result of the bombing in the summer of 1945, it turns out that Hiroshima, in terms of the number of civilian deaths is in second place.Īnd if you calculate the area of destroyed urban areas, it turns out that Hiroshima fourth. We think the death toll is out of all proportion. These are the biggest losses from the bombing of cities.īecause of the way the story is told to us, we often imagine that the bombing of Hiroshima was much worse. Then in Tokyo burned about 41 square kilometer urban area. It became the most destructive bombing of a city in the history of wars. The first conventional bombardment was carried out against Tokyo at night from 9 to 10 March 1945. Therefore, it can be argued that some air raids using conventional bombs in terms of their destructive power approached two atomic bombings. With conventional bombing, the destruction was uniform (and therefore, more effective) and one, albeit more powerful, bomb loses a significant part of its destructive power at the epicenter of the explosion, only raising dust and creating a pile of debris. The yield of the Hiroshima bomb was 16.5 kilotons, and a bomb with a power of 20 kilotons.) (A kiloton is a thousand tons, and is the standard measure of the yield of a nuclear weapon. This means that during a typical air raid using non-nuclear weapons, each city fell 4-5 kilotons. Usually the raid was carried out by 500 bombers. In the midst of all this nightmare of destruction and death, it could hardly come as a surprise that this or that blow didn't make much of an impression– even if it was inflicted by an amazing new weapon.Ī B-29 bomber flying from the Mariana Islands, depending on the location of the target and the height of the strike, could carry a bomb load weighing from 7 to 9 tons. Throughout the summer, Japanese cities exploded and burned from night to night. The damage inflicted by non-nuclear airstrikes was colossal. 66 air raids were carried out using conventional weapons, and two used atomic bombs. Approximately 1.7 million people were left homeless, 300,000 people died and 750,000 were injured. In Japan, 68 cities were bombed, and all of them were partially or completely destroyed. In the summer of 1945, the US Air Force carried out one of the most intense urban destruction campaigns in world history. The city, where 433,000 people lived before the invasion, was reduced to ruins. However, from the point of view of modern Japan, the atomic bombing is not easy to distinguish from other events, just as it is not easy to distinguish a single drop of rain in the middle of a summer thunderstorm.Īn American Marine looks through a hole in the wall at the aftermath of the bombing. In terms of history, application atomic bomb may seem like the most important single event in the war. Presented statistics of the most severe bombing of Japanese cities BEFORE atomic strikes just amazing. However, we will not anticipate and give an excerpt from a voluminous article by Ward Wilson (Ward Wilson) „ It was not the bomb that won the victory over Japan, but Stalin".
![japanese methodist preacher meets pilot of enola gay japanese methodist preacher meets pilot of enola gay](http://www.alumni.emory.edu/emorywire/issues/2015/august/of_interest/story_3/kiyoshi-tanimoto.jpg)
And, for many, such a statement will seem unexpected, those events were even more cruel! Remember what pictures you saw of the bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and try to imagine that before that, the Americans acted even more inhumanly! However, the military events in the Japanese-American war were, before the drop of the atomic bombs, no less inhumane and bloody. After all, it died cleanly civil population! And the radiation accompanying a nuclear strike many decades later crippled and cripples newly born children. The act, in itself, is barbaric, inhuman. It is unlikely that we will be mistaken in assuming that most of us are still convinced that Japan capitulated because the Americans dropped two atomic bombs of enormous destructive power. Another US crime, or Why did Japan capitulate? Stunning material about the reasons for the surrender of Japan in World War II, about the atrocities of the Americans in Japan and how the US and Japanese authorities used the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for their own purposes.