Someone has to post it...
Posted on 08/06/2015 8:52:11 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
“The only thing that I do not understand is, why Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why not Tokyo, centered on the “false emperor’s” palace?”
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also industrialized cities, supporting the war machine of Japan
Japan should be thankful we only used two bombs and gave them time between to surrender. We could have just as easily waited a few months then loaded 100+ bombs and absolutely destroyed Japan.
“the “god” emperor needed to be humiliated and humanized, not martyred”
Did you read the rest of my post? If that had been carried out then ‘martyrdom’ would not be an issue.
Who would be inclined to mess with the USA if the rest of my post had been carried out?
It is exactly like Patton said, paraphrased!: “The problem is that the politicians never let us finish the wars.”
Even Genghis Khan, who I admire, made only one mistake: He let the women and children live so that they could breed more evil.
Let me see, America dropped the bomb on Tokyo on Dec 7 1941 and started the war with Japan, right. I find it appalling that it is the US that is second guessed and not the instigators of the second world war. It was Japan that started the steps toward the bombing of their cities not he US. If they suffered then they need to look at their own history and this country needs to quit wringing its hands over something that they had no control over.
Ask the Chinese how they were treated by the Japanese. Ask the Korean women how they were treated by the Japanese. I don’t think we have anything to apologize for and should not be doing so.
Please see my post # 23.
In the run-up to the planned invasion of Japan, physicist William Shockley was asked to prepare a casualty estimate for Secretary of War Henry Stimson. He calculated the twin invasions of the main Japanese islands, scheduled for the Fall of 1945 and the Spring of 1946, would result in as many as 1.7 million casualties, with 400-800,000 KIA—roughly the same number killed (on the low end) in all battles/all theaters up to that point. More conservative estimates from Admiral William Leahy put our expected combat deaths between 250-300,000. The number of Japanese dead would be in the millions.
Here’s another way of looking at the cost of invading Japan. Most of the Purple Hearts awarded to our dead and wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq came from stocks produced ahead of the planned amphibious landings in Japan. As of 2010, there were still more than 100,000 of those WWII medal kits still in defense supply warehouses.
A lot of us wouldn’t be here today if the U.S. hadn’t dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father was part of the 1st Army that fought its way across Europe after D-Day. Plans called for the 1st to lead the invasion of Honshu in the spring of 1946, with the objective of taking Tokyo. It would have been a bloody, protracted campaign, and a lot of ETO vets did not expect to make it through a second campaign against Japan.
That's a deliberate, straight-out repudiation of God. The notion that good ends justify evil means is a moral theory condemned ever since St. Paul wrote Romans 3:7-8:
"But if through my falsehood God's truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just."
Some people say it depends on whether they thought the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering before August 6, 1945 --- or not. I would not be the one to make the call on that, because I haven't got the military experience and expertise.
But some people DO have that kind of expertise. Historians record that most of America's WWII military leadership thought Japan was already n the verge of collapse before the atom bombs were used:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3321050/posts
"Six of the seven five-star generals and admirals of that time believed that there was no reason to use them, that the Japanese were already defeated, knew it, and were likely to surrender before any American invasion could be launched. Several, like Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower, also had moral objections to the weapon. Leahy considered the atomic bombing of Japan “barbarous” and a violation of 'every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war.'"
I don't think these American military leaders were pinkos, pacifists or fools.
But the real problem isn't not that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were strategically unnecessary. The real problem is that, in terms of an ethic of killing, there is a difference between targeting soldiers/combatants/military assets, and civilians/noncombatants/civilian values.
Most people in the world today at least profess to recognize this distinction (except for ISIS and their ilk).
It's hard to put it any clearer than this:
"Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and humankind itself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation." (Gaudium et Spes, para. 80, 1962)
Utterly crushing the Japanese military/political machine would have been justice. Incinerating civilians with a deliberately indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction, was murder. That should be clear when you consider that General Douglas MacArthur and his staff wrongly succeeded in exonerating Emperor Hirohito and all members of the imperial family from criminal prosecutions.
Thus in the end, 250,000 civilians were killed, and the Emperor Hirohito was not.
Hiroshima: Thoughts on an awful anniversary [Do the Ends Justify the Means?]
In that case, absolutely.
Sadly a lesson that America became so afraid of as to not have learned from it. Thus the Vietnam War and others.
The lesson being if you lack the spine, the willingness, the courage to win a war, then stay the hell out of it or surrender from the start............
“Do the ends justify the means?” is a loaded question vis-a-vis the bombing of Hiroshima, implying that atoms were unjustified merely by virtue of their being atoms. The ends, less death, are justified - whether by bullets or atoms makes no difference in the justification, less death is justified. If less death would be obtained by bullets that would have been the choice. It was determined that less death would result from atoms.
The question is an attempt to vilify atoms.
Do not mistake this for minimizing the enormity of this single act.
“Hiroshima: Thoughts on an awful anniversary [Do the Ends Justify the Means?]”
The question is meaningless — the ends ALWAYS justify the means for Democrats.
I don’t disagree with the decision, though. Broken clock and all....
“Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.” People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” “
-Paul Fussell
Tokyo had been firebombed earlier by Gen. Curtis Lemay, which resulted in 90,000 deaths.
The term “kokutai” is quite the euphemism.
Take note that Shinzo Abe is a member of a revanchist Shinto group whose aim is to re-establish state Shinto.
thank you for a more complete answer
The Japanese 'Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps', which included civilian men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people,who would attack the Allies with sword, spears, hoes and shovels.
How would history judge us when we slaughtered millions of women and children?
The “means” were well justified in the planning and execution.
Dropping the bomb saved a million lives that would have been lost in a continuing conventional battle.
There is nothing “more humane” about killing with bullets and bombs, over an expanded period of time.
When your own top military officer, who has lived and studied among your proposed enemy (Yammamoto) says you can't win the war ... maybe listening to him would be a good idea.
“the{ir} “god” emperor needed to be humiliated and humanized, not martyred”
As does ours.
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