IMHO

Michael, you're absolutely right. Seems like you normally are I agree that it's also an interesting lesson of the history. The horrors of WWII as a compelling need to overreact on the Allied part after they underreacted when they could stop it easily. I don't mean any "moral" charge here - just history.

JonS, I fully agree that the conclusion that I should stop writing is badly wrong But... May I...

Summary May I just sum up the discussion before so that we can close the "moral" topic. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was (un)necessary evil As it was rightfully said here the answer totally depends on the question of whether Japan would have surrendered and how many months it would have taken. The detailed information should be in the good books named here (thanks a lot for the recommendations, can't say for everyone but I promise to read them). Laws of war The current laws of war state that intentionally and/or unnecessary killing civilians to one's military benefit or even to break the nation's will to fight is a war crime. This does not apply to collateral CIVCAS. If one accepts that then 9/11 is an act of terror but Allies did committed a number of war crimes. If one sticks to the concept of total war then one is bound to accept 9/11 as not a terrorist act but a simple act of war for which perpetrators are finally punished. Now I solemnly promise to refrain as much as possible from engaging in the "moral" sub line of this discussion

I didn't read Douhet himself but certainly know about the doctrine. Well... What can I say... Hitler also wrote his racial theories. Same thing for me.

Probably there would have been no real WWII at all.

However ill-logic it may be but starting a war is not a war crime. So even if one country attacks another the defender does not get the right to exterminate civilian population of the aggressor for its own military benefit. Because THAT would be a war crime.

1. I've always been convinced Germany would have lost even with the perfect knowledge. 2. What if Japan hadn't surrendered after the nukes? Nuke them more? I mean once you go down the path of "unconditional surrender by all means without loss of American blood" you end up facing a probable need to exterminate the whole nation.

1. I do not condone what Japanese did. 2. Well... Then one can apply this logic to 9/11. Well... I believe it's true that Allied leaders were very much similar to Hitler et al. Bombing Hamburg, Dresden, Pforzheim the way that was done is not very different from the Hitler's mass killings of Jews. It's just Hitler lost and Allies won. So German concentration camps are war crimes but the proposal to exterminate 100'000 Wehrmacht officers is not in every school textbook on history. Truly Allies probably did not care much about how many Japanese civilians they should kill to get an "unconditional surrender".

Thanks for the recommendations. I finish Tooze and go to the War in the Pacific books

Thanks a lot for the recommendations. I haven't read Downfall. I have never gone through the War in the Pacific in proper detail And I'm going through the Tooze now He does seem to have some strong ideas about Germany PS I tried to send you a message the other day. But the system said you've got your forum inbox full

1. Thank you for your post. You're right that this boils down to a perfectly discussable question of whether the Japan would have surrendered and if yes how many months it would have taken. From what I read they would have done that. Months - I don't know, I haven't gone that far. So to make a more detailed and specific argument for this I need to go back to the reading desk. 2. Blockade could have been Cuba-like - foodstuff and medicines might have gone in. 3. The start of the war in the Pacific is also quite an interesting topic to discuss. I mean oil embargo. I don't think it would be such a flare - remembering what Japanese did to the conquered nations. Definitely interesting to pick your brain on the start of the war as well. May be after we finish the surrender

"Ready to fight till the last man and last bullet" is not quite accurate I believe. Even the utmost hawks understood that the war was lost - they were hawks but not morons. So they wanted to negotiate an honorable end to the war. So to create a need to negotiate they gambled that Allies wouldn't land on the islands because of the high losses due to the the Japanese will to fight. But the US proved by action that there's another option not foreseen by the Japanese commanders and that was total obliteration of not the Japanese military might but Japanese nation itself. So Japan surrendered. For me 750'000 civilian lives lost is too high a price for the words "unconditional surrender". Whatever war and whatever nation.

1. Bombing German cities is no different. Just like German terror bombing London. Certainly I didn't mean that only American fire- and nuclear bombing are war crimes. 2. Allied casualties would have happen only in case of further landings onto Japan land. There was no way Japanese in China, Manchuko and Pacific islands were able to fight without supplies. A blockade would have done the job. May be then it wouldn't have been such a humiliating surrender for Japan but certainly a total win for Allies. 3. As for victor taking - I don't see your point. This was the way all countries were made including US. Again I don't think we shall call Hawaii "the land of the Kingdom of Hawaii temporarily occupied by US forces"

1. Japan couldn't have built any more Yamatos by that time so militarily it was just as useful as a junk cars yard. 2. War crimes are also war time acts. Truman had his victory in the pocket. He could have blockaded the islands and would have had a surrender negotiations within two or three months with no major loss of American life. But Truman didn't want just ANY military victory. He wanted his victory to be a swift and spectacular revenge for Pearl Harbor. Victory over Japanese nation not the Japanese armed forces. Here are the quotes from his atomic bombing announcement: The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid manyfold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. ... We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. ...they [Japanese leaders] may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. To me this sounds exactly like Osama Bin Laden. Ready to sacrifice innumerable lives for achieving personal political goals.

Kuril Islands Here's the direct citation from the Yalta agreement The leaders of the three great powers – the Soviet Union, the United States of America and Great Britain – have agreed... (a) The southern part of Sakhalin as well as the islands adjacent to it shall be returned to the Soviet Union; ... 3. The Kurile Islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union. Here's a direct quote (Article 2c) from the The Treaty of San Francisco (signed by Japan) Japan renounces all right, title and claim to the Kurile Islands... So it's no more an occupation than the fact that Hawaii belongs to the US. Let's not grad it into the politics. Nukes Those were the bombing of civilian population not the military installations. Like the fire bombing of Japanese cities where 500'000 people died. Again cities not military targets. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were big cities not remote places to show the might of new weapons. It's exactly like 9/11 - deliberate killing of as many civilians as possible to reach military objectives by inducing terror among the population.

Oh and we can have elite panzer hookers. Like PzKpfH VIII (PanzerKampfHooker).

Killing a quarter of a million civilians looks hardly a "life-saving" act. The only reason, I believe, why Truman needed nukes was to prevent a repetition of the Europe front - where Soviets got half of Europe. Plus threaten Stalin with an uber-bomb because for some reason the Western powers believed Stalin could go right through their lines and reach Atlantic. By the time the atomic bombing took place Japan was bombed into the stone age. No oil, no metals, almost no food. Fighting with bamboo sticks Japanese would have hardly be major threat for allied armies. So it's not a war it's a war crime.

Sorry just read this post of yours. I agree I'd better put it to rest for now until I finish Tooze But it's gonna be interesting about the numbers. Just dig up the Germany military spending vs. GDP. 1944 share of military spending is higher than in UK, USSR, US... So I can't imagine a logic to prove that Germany could not mobilize as much as Allies because of backward agricultural sector if the numbers say it did mobilize "more" Anyway, back to Tooze..

First lets' agree we're talking about military industry NOT the civilian economy. And here are the numbers for the tank production: 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 370 2,799 3,623 5,530 13,657 18,956 4,406 There are similar numbers for aircraft, artillery pieces, submarines, small arms cartridges, gas (crude processing and synthetic) and many many more things. All will be about the same thing - military production between 1940 and 1944 increased 3-7 times depending on the item line with an ever increasing complexity of the items. For a besieged country starved of imported oil, foodstuff, non ferrous metals etc. with production facilities under constant strategic bombing and women almost totally out of the industrial production (means half of the population non contributing), I'd say this qualifies for a miracle So if the point is to say the military production (not the civilian economy) is wrecked then there should be the stats showing the rapid decline in production. Right?

1. I think we're talking about more or less the same thing Headshots at TCs should not be one shot one kill exercise. Should it be three shots per kill or five shots per kill I don't know as I don't have WWII real life statistics (probably no one has). As an example, to derive an approximation we can get WWII sniper range training standards and compare them to the current range training (or regular troop training if there are no available WWII sniper data). This will give us the difference in technology. Then apply this coefficient to the current sniper shots per kill data (we can ask on "real" military forums) and I believe we will have a good approximation for the WWII stats. 2. As for biathlete - it's not so obvious. Hundreds of range training shots each month for a biathlete vs. (my guess) 10-30 per month even for an elite WWII sniper. .22LR with extremely low recoil vs. full power cartridges. Match grade ammo vs. mass production ammo. Custom filling vs. factory filling. Fresh barrels vs. hundreds/thousands rounds wear. But anyway both sublines of discussed exhausted itself due to the lack of stats

1. I don't comment on the tests - didn't read the results. So it's more like general remark. 2. There were so few Zaytsevs. So even when we're talking about elite snipers - these are not top 5 - more like top five hundred. 3. Again may be obvious. What goes for training shooting is normally a) known distance, no wind, c) known humidity and temperature, d) match grade ammo, e) more or less fresh barrel, f) long preparation time, g) no stress. I'd take biathlon shooting as more of a measure for real life sniping.

May be obvious info but... Scoring headshots at TCs actually must have been quite difficult at that time. Current military issue sniper rifles provide ~1MOA accuracy for a new barrel and match grade ammo at a test range (controlled distance, no wind). So for WWII technology we may assume 1.5 MOA in ideal conditions (1.5MOA is about the current standard for a sniper munition - cheaper than match grade - and designated marksman rifle). So add here no range finders, significantly higher barrel wears, non-sniper munitions, no ballistic computers, no weather stations - you can easily end up having 3-4MOA. And that will be 7.5-10cm dispersion at 100m.

I'm probably shooting my own feet as I love the snipers but... I read a couple of lengthy interviews with German and Soviet snipers of WWII. If my memory does not fail me the main points were: 1. The maximum hitting range for the best super elite German snipers was 600m. And 600m was a very rare event - the standard was 400m. Beyond 600m they never attempted to shoot, it was a waste of concealment. 2. The maximum hitting range for an "average good" German sniper was 400m and that was also a quite rare event. The standard was around 300m. 3. The more experienced guy actually told that scoring hits was not the major objective for a German sniper. Rather they were mostly tasked with suppressive fire. Interdiction, harassment, delay of enemy advance etc. NOT kills per se. And the suppressive effect of sniper fire was devastating. Also if we assume we model an "Average Hans" (whatever the experience) in the game realistically then kill-ratios should be quite low. After all the guys who scored more than 30 kills for the whole of WWII are all in the hall of fame now But the question is supression - all the German veterans told sniper was extremely effective in this respect. If anyone interested I can try to dig up the source.

He's definitely exemplary. At least in breadth I've got another book of him - "Statistics and the German State", 333 pages devoted to perturbations of economical statistics in Germany in 1900-1945. My, my But I've always been scary of putting all my eggs in one basket. Sorry, didn't quite get the Horace Geeley line... Seems like Tooze has some special agenda in tearing down "Speer myth" I mean it's obvious Speer wasn't Harry Potter. No magic wand And anyway he couldn't have done retooling in 1934 as he wasn't the "retooling tsar" in 1934. Not arguing with you - just funny how Tooze puts it.

Why not an option? I'm reading Tooze right now. Just started so definitely don't have a complete picture... But what strikes me most so far is if the theoretical argument is that Germany was unable to ramp up military production due to near-wrecked economy then how did it happen in real life in 1942-1944? Availability of some critical imports was actually considerably lower than in 1939-1940 but still they managed to increase production 2-3 times. So far I'm sticking to the obvious view that you need to differentiate between two issues. First is the civilian economy, "normalcy of every day life", political desire to keep raising the living standards for the wide swathes of population and resources required to attain that. The other issue is increasing military output in mobilization mode by switching massive parts of GDP into military gears and putting up to work as much reserves as politically attainable. I'm looking forward on how Tooze plays out on the first issue but it seems to me it's hard to argue that the Germany WAS able to resolve the second issue as the history proves. And why exactly do we believe what was done in 1942 couldn't have been done in 1939-1940? There's at least one argument I know and that is the view that German population would have rebelled if the economy was mobilized in 1939-1940 when there was no sense of "Mother Germany In Danger". So what do you think?