Went into this below but that is mostly a myth/narrative related to a “good war” coupled with remnants of the idea that these are warriors/knights fighting.

The reality is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki WERE “military” targets in the sense that they were industrial centers. They weren’t where all the troops were stationed. They WERE where all the troops got their guns and equipment from (I forget exactly what the factories were set up to build but it was military supplies). Which was particularly important as Japan was largely on its last legs. Their navy and air force were mostly in tatters and they were frantically trying to rebuild before the Allies defeated them.

And, as mentioned below, these weren’t armies made up of professional soldiers. They weren’t even armies made up of dumbass kids who got tricked into signing paperwork. Every (?) military in WW2 was built around drafted civilians. Maybe peer pressure made you pretend you wanted to go overseas and fight some “Japoteurs” but the reality is that you were sent a letter in the mail saying “get your ass to this bus station or we will arrest you”. The difference between someone sitting in downtown Hiroshima and in a military base in Tokyo mostly boiled down to luck of the draft lottery (and Japan was in the process of MASSIVELY increasing the “eligibility” for the draft).

Which is the true horror of war. It isn’t about two big burly men fighting until one of them has had enough and yields. It is about forcing your enemy to capitulate. That means taking away their ability to fight AND their will to fight. Kill enough soldiers and the morale “back home” breaks down (The US in Vietnam is the quintessential example). Take away their weapons and they are forced to conserve resources and are unable to fight. Destroy their food supplies and they starve. But it is the “civilians” who are suffering because they are losing their family every time you kill a soldier. They are dying in the factories when you bomb them. They are starving a lot sooner than the frontline troops are. And that is also contributing to morale.

Which gets back to what a mess all of this is. Because nobody with even an iota of humanity thinks the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “deserved” this (and I say this as someone whose family directly suffered because of Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China). And, again, at the very least people need to read those accounts. Hearing about children basically having their skin melted off by black rain is horrifying. But what people fail to do is read up about people being raped and tortured by the invading soldiers when “military cities” are attacked. They fail to read up about all the civilians in the logistics train who get killed when “military targets” are attacked. And they are indoctrinated enough into propaganda that they don’t really think about the distinction between dying in bed at home versus dying in bed in a barracks when a five hundred pound bomb is dropped on you. Because people are so fixated on the idea that you lose all right to live the moment your government says “Here is a gun. You can either kill the enemy or go to prison. Also, we might just execute you on the spot rather than deal with shipping you to a jail cell. Remember, your enemies are Other”

But also? Go drive around the nearest military base to where you live. If it is an air force base, there is a good chance it is literally next door to a civilian airport (partially for weather and flight path reasons). Regardless, there are probably a lot of businesses, apartment complexes, hospitals, etc. Because most military bases are small cities unto themselves… and because it ensures that blowing up a military target still has civilian casualties which, if handled correctly, can be spun as indiscriminate murder of civilians and a reason to keep fighting.

To quote Sartre, “When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die”. And while it is important to try to minimize civilian casualties, it is also important to understand… civilian casualties are the point.

And just to contrast this a bit with some OTHER war crimes the US Military did. One of our favorite tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq and all the other fun places we go to murder brown people is to take out “high value targets”. Fire a hellfire missile into someone’s bedroom. Oops, we missed and killed the family next door. Oh well, the people are still demoralized so a win’s a win. Or maybe we didn’t miss and STILL killed the family next door!

My personal ethics regarding this? I think all of this is evil and even the “good” wars like WW2 (saving the victims of the Holocaust and the victims of Imperial Japan) are mostly a case of realizing after the fact that we had a justification for some of the war crimes we did (and if you never want to sleep again? Go read up on what Russia and the US did to the Korean and Chinese victims of Imperial Japan. I’ll give you a hint: White folk are REALLY bad at giving a shit about why your eyes are slanted but they are REALLY good about taking out some aggression on the people they were brainwashed into hating).

They went for very military industrial complex cities as possible. There was no purely miltrry target big enough. But is it worse than the fire/bombing that went on against many cities in the war (e.g. Dresden, Tokyo, Coventry, London west end and mamy many more.)

I strongly encourage doing a bit of research on the bombings.

The traditional American and UK (once we gave them the tech) stance is “We had no choice. We needed to strike decisively to prevent a bloody invasion. The Japanese were fighting to the last man in every other battle”. The (modern) Japanese stance largely being “The war was already over and America just wanted to show off to Russia” with generally no reference to WHY Imperial Japan was the kind of nation that people would be able to sell unleashing literal hell on.

The reality is obviously very murky with a lot of revisionist history and many of the common statements like “Even Eisenhower was opposed to it” ignoring why military commanders would be opposed to “technology” potentially taking the “glory” of winning the war away from them. But basically all historians agree the war was largely “over” by that point. Japan was the last major power of the Axis that was still standing and their air force and navy were in tatters. There likely would have been a ground invasion (or excessive coastal shelling) but it mostly becomes a question of whether more civilians and conscripted soldiers would have died than the number of civilians (and conscripted soldiers) who died in the bombings.

But Americans do like to point out that fewer Americans died through the use of atomic bombs. Which… maybe isn’t the best answer to “we did two of the most historic war crimes in human history”

One thing which has always deeply bothered me is that the argument is generally that more soldiers would have died than civilians if we had done the land invasion. Which is true. But it ignores two key aspects

1. Japanese soldiers were conscripts. Hell, basically every soldier in every army was drafted. Does someone lose their right to exist because they didn’t run fast enough when the MPs came to take them to boot camp?
2. In large part because of the myth of “the good war”, people seem to think the unarmed women and children of those coastal cities would have been safe. American GIs were just as evil as everyone else’s soldiers and “true” civilians are the ones who suffer from an occupying force. We had considerably less systematic and government sponsored abuse but that doesn’t mean that every single family was a bunch of French people cheering for the heroic Americans to come and protect them.

Again, I am not justifying this. I believe the use of nuclear weapons is the kind of sin that stains a nation forever. I also feel that way about most things done in war. But people should understand the circumstances and the arguments for and against it.

I heard they were still.using those bags for the Iraq/afrghan wars of 2000s

Also the purple hearts and some other medals we built and didn’t need.