Alex WellersteinVerified account

Where do we get this idea from? It's a mixture of sources. The first is from the fact that there were leaflets warning about bombings dropped by the Allies. The main one of these that people know is the LeMay leaflet, which named cities that the US planned to attack.

Which as an aside makes perfect sense: the atomic bombing missions were totally secret, and were not massed firebombing raids with hundreds of planes. They featured a couple VERY VULNERABLE planes, and the ones with the bombs were un-armored and un-armed, to lessen their weight.

The security of the missions would have been jeopardized if they had given warning — it would have been clear which plane needed to be shot down, and that a single B-29 should be attacked and not ignored (that it wasn't, say, a weather plane).

(I bring this up not because I am justifying the lack of warning, but just to point out that the idea of warning Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Kokura) wouldn't make any sense at all if you understand how the planners thought.)

I've never seen any real source that says that Hiroshima etc. ever got leaflets that warned of any kind of impending attack. I have seen generic "we CAN bomb anywhere we want" leaflets on display at the Hiroshima Peace Museum —but nothing that suggested specificity or immanency.

(One can ask: Why did the CIA do this? Why doesn't it fix it? I suspect incompetence more than malfeasance, but we'll get to the motivations of why people invoke the "warning" in a moment.)

The library has listed the date as "August 6, 1945," though the leaflet they have on there is undated. It was neither created NOR DROPPED on August 6, 1945 (the Hiroshima attack date). The fact that it is post-Hiroshima is clear if you read it—it talks about the Hiroshima attack.

But — and this is a very nice exercise in what historians have to do to make sense of primary sources — there is more story to this than the document itself can reveal. When was it made? Was it actually dropped? And where? are questions that the library does not answer.

So they weren't warned with leaflets. The last refuge of the "they were warned" crowd is "well, didn't Truman warn them in the Potsdam Declaration?" Not really — it said, we want unconditional surrender, and the alternative was "prompt and utter destruction."

Is that a veiled reference to the atomic bomb? Probably. But it is one that only makes sense after you know the atomic bomb exists — which was kept a secret. It's not a warning if you can't understand it until AFTER the event you are being warned against.

The US planners HAD considered warning Japan about the atomic bomb, and had rejected the idea. They deliberately kept it secret for reasons both tactical (avoid the bombing planes being targeted) and psychological (they hoped the "shock" would dislodge Japan's high command).

Which is to say, the idea that the cities were warned doesn't even make much sense of the face of it. It's not something that Groves, Truman, Tibbets, or anyone else connected to the bombing program ever claimed. So why are do so many people claim it today?

The answer is pretty clear to me: they think it lessens the moral difficulty of defending the bombing. If we warned them, and they didn't surrender or evacuate, then it's really their fault they died, not ours, right?

This is bad reasoning on every front. If Bin Laden had said, "I'm going to attack major American cities," and then he did it — would we have said, "well, he warned us"? No, of course not. It's an absurd notion. Even if the warning was very specific, it still doesn't absolve.

The fact that there was no warning in the case of Hiroshima/Nagasaki just makes this argument all the more ridiculous. It'd bad reasoning even if it HAD happened — but it DIDN'T happen. Which makes it something of a farce.

I always tell people who spout this: look, one CAN make arguments in favor of the Hiroshima bombing (and Nagasaki, too, but it gets harder). All arguments for and against are contentious, but they can be made. But don't base your argument on something that 100% didn't happen!

(And before people get on me: I know there are other myths/spin/lies/misconceptions, including big ones. But this is the one that bugs me the most, because it 100% didn't happen. There's no real room for interpretive dispute here — it's just false.) /THREAD