Article reasoning that what ended World War II was not the atom bomb

[Kasz216]

Mr Khan said:

Kasz216 said:

bobgamez said:
why exactly did they need to hit defenseless citizens? why couldnt they just nail army bases, it would of had the same effect. Thats one of the things i hated about the bombing decision of the US then

1) Back then Total War was the definition of the day.  See for example the Nazi bombings of London.  Back then they figured bombing cities would cause a countries people to demand surrender quicker.

2) Army bases were generally based inside or near cities.  The cities they attacked actually did have military facilties that were the targets.  Hiroshima was home to a number of military camps and had a supply base.  

Nagasaki was a huge industrial city that produced a lot of war matierals.  90% of the cities workers built things for the war.

 

They were honestly probably the best military targets available, because all the other ones had already been bombed into dust.

An argument i've read is that the Germans would have won the air "Battle of Britain" if they had stayed focused on air-fields and military facilities, but the idea that terrorizing the populace would work better is what ultimately took the pressure off the RAF enough to allow them to regroup.

Really Germany's defeat in WWII was an object lesson in how going out of your way to be evil just hurts you yourself: they wasted a great lot of resources burning Jews (and even tried to up the timetable on the Holocaust as the war turned sour, when if they had just put it on hold and prioritized killing Soviet soldiers over Jewish civilians, they could have done something), or switching the focus of the battle of Britain to a civilian terror campaign, or their rotten treatment of Soviet civilians (could've gotten a lot more on their side than they did if they had gone out of their way to show that their enemy was Stalin and not the Slavic Peoples)

I never said it was a good idea.

Just simply they THOUGHT it was a good idea at the time.  Hence part of the decision making on why.