Since the comments are already filling with simplistic takes on the bombings, I would encourage anyone who is interested in a substantive discourse to listen to Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History discussion on this topic[1].
I also recommend the book “The Story of World War 2” as likely the best single book to understand the tragedy and complexity of the war, as well as what the Allies fought for and against[2].
Let us hope humanity never fights such a war again.
My first hand accounts mostly come from my Father. He was a young Marine Corp officer on Okinawa during World War II. What a sad and terrifying time. He was stationed next to an air base on Okinawa and was issued a gas mask after the bombing of Hiroshima in preparation for the retalitory strikes they expected.
After Japan surrendered, there was a sudden shift in roles as the soldiers packed up and prepared to return the the USA. At one point, with little to do, he was offered a ride on a plane that was heading over to the mainland of Japan for some reason. He got to see Hiroshima and Tokyo, spending some time on the ground and interacting with a few Japanese citizens there. My father passed away a couple of years ago and I wish that my brother and I could have recorded his accounts of some of these things.
Another great book (by an American but from the Japanese perspective) is The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 by John Toland. One of the books referenced by Dan in his podcast and contains many first hand accounts of Japanese soldiers, citizens, and leadership.
Much more nuanced account of the history and mindset that lead to the war and sustained it than most of the responses here would indicate.
I wish I had more information on what the day was like for Japanese citizens.
As a child in the US, my understanding was that we warned people to leave and anyone that stayed was considered an enemy combatant. Now that I'm older I doubt that narrative is true; especially given the endless lies and gaslighting the US Govt uses on its own people.
The museum in Hiroshima specifically notes that the claim that America notified people in Hiroshima before dropping the bomb was 100% fiction. Nobody expected the United States to specifically target tens of thousands of innocent civilians instead of military targets in a single sweep.
Papers were dropped across the entire country warning Japan to give up. But that’s like Russia warning the entirety of Ukraine that they’re going to destroy them then acting like nuking Kiev is justified because civilians had fair warning.
It’s not hard to even find the papers online that were dropped, but there’s a lot of revisionism online that actively defends nuking civilian targets these days. Mentioning the fact the warning claim isn’t accurate gets immediate downvotes and angry comments everywhere online. Even Wikipedia specifically mentions Hiroshima wasn’t listed, and the papers are publicly available and mention only cities that aren’t Hiroshima, so I’m not sure why people get outraged.
This enormous cultural destruction was averted because the US Secretary of War had taken his honeymoon in Kyoto decades earlier. Presumably he had no such emotional connection to the innocents killed in Nagasaki.
The Japanese had sufficient time to surrender after the first nuke was dropped.
The second was apparently what was required for them to capitulate. The loss of life (on both sides) from an invasion would have been at least an order of magnitude greater.
One terrible action to avoid a prolonged much larger loss of life. I don't envy the people who had to make that difficult decision but it is clear they made the correct one.
If the point was to bluff and insist that we had a thousand nukes ready to go, we should have just dropped one in the remote countryside where the crater can be appreciated but loss of life minimized. There was no strategic merit at this point to this loss of life, nor was there any for the firebombing of tokyo or the bombing of dresden or any of the other war crimes commited by the allies against urban populations who had little choice but to sit and die.
From your own wording, even you don't quite believe that propaganda.
Esp since both nukes and fire bombings did far more damage to civilians structures at that point.
Even if you ignore the wanton destruction, Russia flipping over to allies and cornering Japan by that time would have been enough to destroy Japanese moral as much as the fire bombings did.
So really the excess use of force by that time wasn't really needed, and trying to justify it now sounds like making poor excuses at revisionism.
The Japanese were brutal, determined fighters. Many of them willing to fight it out to the last man.
Imagine you’re Truman or a General who has watched countless Allied and Japanese die in the war. How exactly would you get an enemy like that to surrender if you’re not willing to deliver a couple knockout punches?
It was a sarcastic comment tbh, as in it seems pretty wild that the only reason for a city to be spared and the other to be zeroed being the destination of a general of war honeymoon...
This says that the Nagasaki leaflets may not have made it to Nagasaki until after the bomb was dropped. The leaflets that may have been dropped before the Hiroshima bomb (“LeMay leaflets”) did not reference the atomic bomb. You also have to be aware that the US had been carpet bombing Tokyo for years by this point. People were used to bombs, just not to the atomic bomb.
We grew up with the idea of atomic bombs but for people in 1945, seeing the destruction that it caused for the first time in human history must have been truly shocking.
The fact that the destruction was caused by a single bomb was shocking to those that appreciated that fact from a distance.
The destruction it caused was on par with conventional overnight HE+incendiary raids already carried for months across Japan and previously across Germany prior to German surrender.
From photographs and M&M stats alone it would be difficult to seperate destruction in Hiroshima from that in Tokyo.
The atomic bomb was “shock and awe” - the implication was that the US would just continue to delete cities one by one easily until Japan surrendered. The destruction was comparable or even less than other firebombing raids but done with one plane.
At the time ... the two atomic bomb tests were the first live theatre tests of two aerial bomb designs only one of which had been previously tested in a controlled tower detonation (Trinity).
The two tests (Hiroshima & Nagasaki) were squeezed into an long ongoing campaign that had already "deleted" 72 cities .. at a time when the conventional campaign was already running out of good targets.
The atomic bombs had been developed at great expense to use on Germany and were not yet ready to test when Germany surrended.
Those military at the head of the Manhatten Project were desperate to find live theatre test sites before Japan surrended to either the US or, god forbid, the Russians (who had advanced so far through the formerly Japanese occupied terrirory in China that Japanee surrender to Russia was considered a very real possibility at the time).
While the Project had the ability to painstakingly handcraft more bombs at a low rate (and at very very great expense), they had not yet developed the Cold War production line ability to reliably turn out hundreds more bombs.
It's well worth reading up on the thoughts of the time before the after the fact post surrender stories spun up and atomic weapon use became a key part of the Cold War zeitgeist.
Dresdens destruction was so severe that now, 78 years later, reconstruction efforts are still ongoing - despite huge efforts and spending of enormous financial resources over the past decades.
The nuclear bomb was shocking, and distracted from the horror of conventional bombing. Dumping white phosphorus and napalm on cities is no less barbaric than nuclear explosions.
LeMay and his ilk were monsters, eager to rain destruction down with any tool available.
So 72 cities got burnt down meaning no place is safe. That doesn’t seem like a fair warning and they could’ve avoided the bombing if they want to—that means civilians are being actively targeted and will be massacred no matter where they are.
Japan is a very, very narrow country. “Cities” are basically just a naming convention. Everything from Nagasaki to Tokyo is, frankly, one continuous urban and industrial area. There’s no place that’s more than a brief drive from a dense populated area along that entire corridor.
You seem to be overlaying a map of Japan now to a map of Japan then. For example, in 1945, Tokyo's population was 7.4 million, whereas it is now several times that. I can't confirm that it takes up a larger area now than it did then but I'd be willing to bet that it does, by quite a way.
It didn't, it was just another bombing raid among many as far as the Japanese government was concerned. It was the entry of the USSR into the war against Japan that ended the war (Japan had been hoping that the USSR would act as a go-between to negotiate peace until that point).
the entry of the USSR into the war against Japan that ended the war
It is impossible to disentangle the events. The Soviets declared war on Aug 8, Nagasaki was Aug 9, surrender was proposed by Japan on Aug 10. It was the totality of events that finally caused Japan to surrender. The Japanese Supreme Council was split on surrender even after Nagasaki and USSR invading Manchuria.
Here is a quotation from Seal Kido, who was a leader in the peace faction in Japan.
On the eve of the atomic attacks, the peace faction’s influence was becoming strong enough to constitute a counterweight against the war faction; and the atomic bombs drastically reduced the sway of the war faction, and the peace faction gained momentum. In addition, the Soviet declaration of war further reduced the dominance of the war faction and gave the peace faction the upper hand. Therefore, I think that the atomic bombs alone could have allowed us to terminate the war. However, the Soviet Union’s entry into the war certainly made it easier [for us]. It is difficult to tell which event contributed more to the termination of the war: the atomic bombs or the Soviet Union’s declaration of war.
...though, at the time?
After several years of war, across the globe, I can understand a messy end.
I can only commend the decision, from afar, as I am pretty sure the Japanese may not have surrendered so soon. And that's an awful lot of atrocities avoided, as well further military and civilian casualties.
//off topic: plus plus to the current Japanese government, and their support for Ukraine.
> Nobody expected the United States to specifically target tens of thousands of innocent civilians instead of military targets in a single sweep.
Yea they did. The US had already bombed most big cities killing hundreds of thousands. The other cities were actively preparing for the same to happen.
It should also be remembered that the firebombings of Tokyo by conventional means caused perhaps even more damage and civilian casualties.
So I think that in the context they simply didn't care about minimising casualties, perhaps even the opposite. They wanted to show that they now had a weapon that made annihilating a whole city much more efficient and practical, and that they were going to use it until Japan surrendered.
The manga Barefoot Gen covers the experience of the locals, based loosely on the author's first hand experience, and was an interesting/enjoyable read for me:
I also grew up in the US. In my high school we read the book "Hiroshima" by John Hersey, which tells what happened that day, according to survivors. I recall it being a powerful read. Gave me a tremendous amount of perspective and empathy for the victims.
There is some historical evidence that the US dropped leaflets warning about the impending bombings and the atomic bombs specifically. For info, Google "LeMay leaflets." It's also likely that the US made AM radio broadcasts about it. Even so, I'm sure the Japanese citizenry would have regarded it as the enemy propaganda it was and largely ignored the messages. And of course no one could have anticipated or imagined the atomic bombs.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the US government notified Japanese government but nobody expected the warning to be taken seriously.
I personally believe doing this is morally no different from just dropping the bomb without warning. Because nobody expected the warning to be taken seriously. Because there was no precedent, because the bomb was developed in complete secrecy, because there was no proof or demonstration to the Japanese government that the claim is real for them to take it seriously.
It is essentially just looking for an excuse for your actions without really honestly trying to avoid using the bomb and deter your enemy. There is a lot alternative ways US could use those bombs without dropping them on densely populated areas.
They could drop it on an unpopulated area and tell "we have more of these". They could drop it on any military installation or grouping of forces that is a bit further away from a populated city. They could explain they have the bomb and invite a representative for a demonstration.
At this point Japan had no capability to prevent US from overflying its territory so it is not like Japanese could do anything to prevent the bomb dropped. Knowing a bomb so powerful was developed and ready they would have no choice but surrender.
Instead US chose to send a signal to everybody at the cost of tens of thousand of lives that were lost only for the purpose of making that signal so much more powerful.
Telling Japanese to evacuate was really completely meaningless move with no moral implications.
> At this point Japan had no capability to prevent US from overflying its territory so it is not like Japanese could do anything to prevent the bomb dropped. Knowing a bomb so powerful was developed and ready they would have no choice but surrender.
The counter argument would be that, if what you have written is true, then Japan would've surrendered before the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki. The surrender didn't happen till days after the second bomb, an invasion by the Soviets, and a coup d'état that, if it had succeeded, would've meant no surrender at all. Some of the "big six" in command of Japan's forces were either so delusional to think they could still win regardless of the situation, or that they didn't mind fighting until obliteration came. They were not rational actors.
> after the second bomb [...] a coup d'état that, if it had succeeded, would've meant no surrender at all
I'm glad to see this brought up. This is almost always left out of these discussions, lead or influenced by people who are sympathetic to Japan or critical of America, including most American public school teachers. Awareness of this coup is almost nonexistent in America among those who profess to know something about Japanese willingness to surrender.
After the SECOND atomic bomb was dropped, there were still many in the leadership of the IJA that didn't want to surrender and made a real attempt to prevent it, even managing to place the Emperor under house arrest. The only reason they failed is because the surrender message was smuggled out of the building and they didn't have a critical mass of men willing to go along with the coup, but that was after two cities were subjected to atomic bombing. Those saying things like "oh America was so mean, they should have just demonstrated the bombs on the ocean or something" are naive and mislead. Even after personally witnessing the severe and prolonged fire bombing of Tokyo, IJA officers in Tokyo weren't ready to surrender. In fact 'strategic bombing' has never ended a war, with the exception of those two atomic bombs. You can firebomb a city to charred rubble and it will only strengthen their resolve to fight. Only the psychological shock of single bombs gutting cities was able to have this effect.
From a purely moral point of view, I don't think the morality of the decision to drop bombs on cities is in any way influenced by what actually happened after. It is only influenced by what happen up to this point and knowledge allies had at that time.
Hindsight is 20/20. We do know that it was expected that Japanese will be fighting to the bitter end and it will be difficult to get them to capitulate. But it is not possible to predict the future exactly -- who is to say that the same course of action could not happen after a powerful demonstration without actually dropping bombs on large cities?
If you start taking future as excuse for the past you could come to some extreme conclusions.
It’s interesting to see how propaganda can be so thinly veiled even in modern times. I had some American friends who said the 7th grade narrative on the War of 1812 was that it was a “tie.”
I agree that public education US history is rather thinly veiled propaganda, but who would you say won the War of 1812? A tie seems like the best way to succinctly describe the war.
The United States declared war and the war ended with a pre-war status quo with British North America intact.
I imagine there’s a level of, “but if we didn’t invade, they would have attacked us.” But we hear that from every belligerent.
This is sure to have potential to be a… fun conversation. So I’ll leave it at this: there is plenty of subjectivity in how one might decide to measure success. This might not be the best example. I’m not really interested to litigate this this morning. =)
Sure, but the stated goals of the end of impressment and the trade restrictions with France happened. Both were more because Napoleon lost, but those were still the stated US aims.
I see it more as "let's attack Britain while they're busy in Europe" than offensive defense. The US banked on France winning in Europe, lost the bet, and still gained Florida in the deal. Not a win, but not really a loss.
I sometimes wonder how the Japanese American War would be regarded today if the war in Europe didn’t happen at the same time, and instead it was judged solely on its own merits. I’m guessing it would be very unpopular.
So you think German imperialism was beyond the pale, but Japanese imperialism was A-okay and is only looked down upon today because it was associated with German imperialism?
Please. If anything you have it completely backwards; the American public were ambivalent to German imperialism until Japan attacked America. Then Germany declared war on America.
Unpopular is a weird word; I assume you mean “looked on unfavourably?” But then, which part are you referring to?
Japan’s pacific colonisation and surprise attack on the US are already frowned upon, the US’s use of nuclear weapons is also generally frowned on. The only part that I think people generally agree with is the US fighting Japan to push back their empire.
After they bombed a military outpost in the middle of the Pacific, which only existed to project force towards them and their neighbors? Was the US response not insanely disproportionate to that?
If Japan had just destroyed a US base, then it would have been proportionate to destroy a Japanese base in retaliation. In reality, Japan launched total war on all its neighbors, and Pearl Harbor was just the first part of this to touch the US directly. The scale of deaths was in the millions before the US entered the war, and there was no guarantee that it wouldn't get far worse. Calculating a proportionate response as if this were a little diplomatic incident just doesn't make sense in this context.
Yes this aligns with my point. This usual analysis has the US acting as a police force to prevent significant aggression, anywhere in the world. However, I believe the mainstream sentiment today is against the US taking on this role (consider the negative view on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc).
For some reason the critical lens of “anti police action” has not been applied to the Japan conflict, in the same way it has been to, say, Vietnam. This inconsistency is what I’m interested in.
I speculate that if the pacific conflict was a standalone war that this lens would be more likely to have been applied by now.
The point of the police in a society is that they have a near-monopoly on armed force, and therefore criminals can't hope to win by escalation. In a world where the US has by far the biggest military, it can to some extent arrogate to itself the role of a police force, which raises the issues you suggest.
WW2 is not this situation, and it's an anachronism to analyze it as such. Pearl Harbor was followed by a string of other US defeats. For a while, it looked like Japan would set up an empire from Alaska to Australia. You don't have the luxury of deciding to hold back in a situation where all your efforts might not be enough.
Was any US territory outside of Asia legitimately at risk? I don’t think so? I think most Americans today would agree that the US should not attempt to acquire territory in Asia, and so would not agree with military action to preserve such territory. But this position is for some reason not carried through to the Japan conflict. In what way is this observation inaccurate?
There were some small Alaskan islands that Japan actually seized. The non-military population of Alaska in 1941 was tiny, about 73k, and land links to the lower 48 were weak, so isolating and occupying the territory by sea might have worked. The same goes for at least the smaller Hawaiian islands. The Philippines were successfully occupied despite a much larger population.
Regarding Asia, I think "to acquire territory" is not the real question. Most Americans today would say that we should assist staunch allies such as South Korea if they were invaded, without any desire to acquire their territory. That goes more for the Philippines in 1941, since the US had given them a 10-year security guarantee under the 1934 Philippine Independence Act.
I don't get this point. You realize how many civilians would've died if a land invasion happened? The war was so bloody, and so intense that it is completely insane to expect the US to not only launch an extremely costly invasion thay would destroy Japan, but also lose hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers in the process. And yeah I know the argument was that japan was about to surrender anyways (which is just not true even then), but that's complete hindsight even if it was true.
It's also awfully convenient, and quite the coincidence that the Japanese state went from absolutely unwilling to surrender and still preparing for a fight until the end to willing to surrender on the Allies terms right when the nukes were dropped... but would've done so anyways?
Do you also think the russians shouldn't have bombed berlin when they were engaged in the extremely intense battle there? Or that the US shouldn't have bombed Germany at all? I guess you might say yes but that's also because you don't have to then send your own troops to a certain death.
The land invasion vs. atomic bombings is objectively a false dichotomy. The U.S. closely monitored Japanese diplomatic cables, and knew that they were seeking a peace treaty negotiated by the USSR, who was still officially neutral.
The Soviet Union invaded Manchuria hours before the second bomb dropped. The goal of the bombings was clearly to posture against the Soviets and reduce their role in the peace process, not to reduce Japanese civilian casualties. The U.S. disregard for civilian deaths is well-documented by the various bombing campaigns they undertook in Japan throughout the war, such as the fire-bombing of Tokyo.
I'm not sure why you're framing that PoV as the undeniable truth when it is far from the current consensus. And yes, manchuria was invaded but considering the fact that even after that AND the first nuke, the japanese government wasn't willing to surrender... that point is completely moot. It's pure speculation, and not an objective fact.
The two atomic bombings and a home island invasion undeniably were not the only two options available to end the war. That is what I said was a fact.
For example, the U.S. could have continued conventional bombing, or installed a blockade around the home islands, or negotiated a treaty, or any number of military and diplomatic actions not involving the irradiation of two large cities. Japan was at the mercy of the Allies at that point, not the other way around.
You can argue that it was the best option available (I strongly disagree), but the atomic bombings or a large scale invasion of the home islands were definitely not the only two options, as frequently claimed by apologists.
Also, it is not historically accurate to claim that Japan was not showing interest in surrendering after the first bombing. Even before the first bombing, the cabinet was split between civilian officials who wanted a treaty and hardliners who wanted to continue the war. As I said earlier, Japan was sending out diplomatic feelers to try and negotiate a peace, even if their leadership was divided.
In world war 2 the concept of "war crimes" was nonexistent, or at the very least considered a normal part of the future of war. Both sides did horrible things to each other's civilians which was a new precedent and set the stage for the industrial-waging wars we saw in the latter half of the 20th century.
Asking for a victor of a war to apologize is such a Western concept that I doubt the Japanese would appreciate it.
After WW2 people were convicted of war crimes and either executed or imprisoned. And people have been convicted continuously up until the present day, for example in Germany.
Yes obviously the reason nobody in the US was punished is because the US won the war. That doesn’t stop it from being regrettable that the people involved in blowing up two cities (the second one apparently by mistake), and we therefore have to hear from sanctimonious Americans claiming that the whole thing was no big deal!
Not really. Germany has been terrible about prosecution. Several Dutch traitors have been able to live their lives in freedom in Germany because they obtained German citizenship due to SS membership so they couldn't be extradited, and Germany refused to retract their citizenship.
And prosecuting them in Germany was delayed so long that eventually they were declared unfit to stand trial. It's ridiculous.
Doing horrible things to supposedly your own civilians (or at least the ones you’re supposed to be liberating) was also not unheard of (even outside the Soviet Union), what with the 20 thousand residents of Normandy killed by Allied bombings during the invasion.
Are you really saying "both sides did bad things" in the same context of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by Japan? That is heavily historically revisionist and just plain offensive.
Some comments here are nuts. Equating what the US and the Allies did during the war to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is insane, and as a Jew just fucking disgraceful. People really need to get a history book.
The link posted is interesting from a historical perspective, but the comments here just ragging on the US for the bombs and treating Japan like an innocent is just crazy to me. I guess thats what happens when you let war-crime denying Japan rewrite the history books. People here really don't grasp how truly _evil_ Imperial Japan was.
The US has nothing to apologize for with regard to Japan in WW2. War isn’t some friendly match where everyone plays nice and we all go home at the end of the day. Japan refused to surrender and an invasion of Japan would have cost more US lives. Japan started it, the US finished it. It’s unfortunate that so many Japanese citizens had to lose their lives to convince their leadership to end the war.
Yes. Look at the Battle of Okinawa, a tiny island with one measly population center. 12,000 Americans, 110,000 Japanese, and 40,000–150,000 civilians were killed. Extrapolate this to the Japanese mainland and the numbers are astonomical. They were also training civilians to take up arms for the coming fight over the mainland.
Well if you know about Okinawa, then you should know the Japanese were conscripting middle school Ryukyuans who are not ethnically Japanese (Yamato) , as well as using this ethnic group as human body bags and a buffer state to slow the invasion into the Japanese mainland. Most of those civilian casualties were not treated as Japanese (Yamato) by the Japanese government and people, and were second class citizens, maybe not even as the darling colony they treated Taiwan as. If anything, the victims of Okinawa is a testament to the evils of Japan imperialism / colonialism during WWII more so than it does America. The imperial Japanese government kidnap the leaders of Okinawa, and forced Okinawans into assimilation. In years prior, Okinawa had become a puppet state and used to proxy trade from Japan, as there were trade embargoes between Japan and China. The Japanese didn’t care about the ethnic majority of Okinawa then, and still don’t care now (Okinawa is the most impoverished of Japan’s prefectures), but when it comes to painting America as evil, then yes, Okinawa is conveniently Japanese
I've actually lived on Okinawa while in the service (Camp Hansen). I didn't know the full history but I know that many prefer to be called Okinawan rather than Japanese.
You mean like how the emperor of Japan who killed more people wasn’t tried as a war criminal? And a shrine to him and other war criminals persist at Yasakuni Shrine, and similar, where large festivals are celebrated every year?
As well as Korea, Indochina, Philippines and more. It’s strange people make Japan the victim and forget about all the other countries that don’t have Anime and other nerd pop culture exports
I think he is saying that FDR stopped selling oil to Japan, in such a way that Japan was provoked to attack the US.
That’s why they attacked Pearl Harbor in the first place: to neutralize the US navy threat in the Pacific while seeking for new oil sources down South.
They were at war with many countries, but they weren’t at war with the US specifically up until that point.
And by the way the US sold oil to Japan to profit from their war machine in Russia, Manchuria and China. It wasn’t until the very end that they stopped selling it.
> I think he is saying that FDR stopped selling oil to Japan
Sure, but then maybe don’t start a war with all of Asia. There was a high degree of grandiosity and hubris where they thought the way out of a losing strategy and resources was to double down and go after more
The U.S. was also in the middle of a mild economic downturn in the 30s, so while I’m sure in hindsight I wish we would have imposed sanctions sooner, I’m not sure I would have done it differently given the exigencies of the time.
Nobody forced Japan to attack the US. 50-100 years from now people will think exactly as they do now: it was Japan’s stubborn leadership’s fault for refusing to surrender that lead to the destruction of those 2 cities and countless lives lost.
American school teachers critical of America often claim that Japan was "forced" to attack America because America was "blockading oil" to Japan. What they never mention are the facts that Japan wanted oil to fuel their Imperial war machine's invasion of China and conquest of the Pacific, or that the "blockade" of oil constituted little more than the Dutch refusing to surrender the Dutch East Indies oil fields to Japan, and America backing up the Dutch. Japan then attacked the US Navy as a prerequisite to seizing the Dutch East Indies.
In other words, America "forced" Imperial Japan to attack by not rolling over and surrendering the Pacific to Imperial Japan when they 'asked nicely'. Japan was "forced" by nothing more than their own imperial ambitions. Those who think America was in the wrong here are implicitly accepting the legitimacy of Japan's imperialist ambitions.
The war really needed to end. The Japanese military of the time were terrible, they slaughtered and mutilated prisoners of war.
And as others have said, the casualties were on par with a single day of firebombing. If anything those were more of a crime because they did nothing to end the war. But about those there's never any complaints.
None of that makes any sense, but the claim that the Japanese were "baited into war" by FDR is borderline lunatic. The Japanese state was already captured by ultranationalist military officers, and its project of expansionism ongoing, before FDR was even president.
Important thing to take out of it: the volume of destruction in Hiroshima, and the mass fire, was due to shitty construction quality. It's like when a hurricane levels entire Puerto Rico once every 10 years but when a stronger hurricane happens in Florida, damage is very localised and not really a problem.
Was it built like a normal European city with brick or reinforced concrete buildings and not enough combustible material for a mass fire, damage and losses could be an order of magnitude smaller. This is also why megaton range bombs are not at all an overkill. Unfortunately, spectacular volume of destruction due to unique circumstances of Hiroshima being widely popularised, created an inflated impression of power of nuclear weapons, stoking fears and preventing Cold War from being finished in a quick job 30 years earlier.
That is still the case in Japan. There is a big fire in the news every single day, and when a house burns, they burn down completely, with only a smoldering pile of ashes remaining. I have never seen something similar in Europe.
I also recommend the book “The Story of World War 2” as likely the best single book to understand the tragedy and complexity of the war, as well as what the Allies fought for and against[2].
Let us hope humanity never fights such a war again.
1. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-42-blitz-...
2. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Story_of_World_War_...