Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan was Unavoidable

Self | August 5, 2012 | Self

[Retain Mike]

Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan Unavoidable

We now mark the 67th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. Once again we must listen to the contra-factual analysis of revisionists as they expound on what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. In support of dropping the atomic bombs historians often cite the inevitability of horrifying casualties, if troops had landed on the home islands. They extrapolate from 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese losses on Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions. However, even these optimistic figures arise from studies preceding the unfolding recognition of American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Such estimates could have vastly understated causalities, because Japan at 374,000 mountainous square miles mathematically enables over 500 defensive redoubts; fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses for the Okinawa invasion. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to planned stubborn defenses of their major cities just as the Germans had maintained in Berlin. The American “island hopping” strategy had ended, because the Japanese had determined the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed. Harry Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”.

The Japanese War Faction maintained the lavish standard of 20 million Japanese deaths for planning final mainland battles; battles intended to inflict millions of casualties, and to convince America to abandon the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese had concealed vastly underestimated quantities of kamikazes and aviation fuel, redeployed veteran Kwantung divisions, mobilized home defense armies, and distributed suicide bombs and bamboo spears to civilians become soldiers.

Americans also faced biological warfare. Occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. These biological pathogens had already been tested on Chinese civilians. For Japan one delivery system directed citizen soldiers to infect themselves and stay behind the advancing troops.

The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war just to indulge some personal moral orthodoxy. If there was any alternative, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall were not about to procure the deaths of countless Americans in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults exceeding D-Day.

The Japanese Privy Council debated the Final Battles arguments into utter physical and mental exhaustion for eleven hours following the Nagasaki bomb on August 9. For the final meeting of Hirohito and his Cabinet, eighty year old Barron Hiranuma was invited to attend, though he always fiercely disapproved of the war strategy. Among his several censures, he reproved Foreign Minister Togo for never making concrete proposals to the Russians and Minister Anami for accepting limitless nuclear warfare deaths without any opportunity to retaliate. The ministers had no answer.

At impasse Hirohito, the god-king, spoke the “Voice of the Crane” in the 30’ by 18’ sweltering, underground bunker. He would bear the unbearable, conclude the war, and transform the nation. Only then did Japan contact Swiss and Swedish foreign offices to commence negotiations with allied belligerents.

Here was demonstrated the critical role Kokutai played in surrender. Any prominent Japanese lived within an intimate spiritual three dimensional fabric of Emperor, citizen, land, ancestral spirits, government, and Shinto religion. Emperor Hirohito foresaw the probability of defeat and had appointed a Peace Faction in January 1944. However, he and his advisors conducted political kabuki through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths. The atomic bombs removed the Final Battles argument, allowing the War Faction to relent, Hirohito to assume his unprecedented roll, and no one to lose face. Their cabal remained within the fabric of Japanese from all eras who had sacrificed for Emperor and Empire.

Another point says the bombs accomplished little. Supposedly Roosevelt’s decree of unconditional surrender was compromised away by allowing Japan to keep their Emperor. However by accepting the Potsdam Declaration, Japan abandoned the militarism that had committed the country to Asian conquest. The Emperor’s and the government’s authority became subject to the Supreme Allied Commander. Their authority was later subject to the Japanese people’s free expression for determining post war government that eradicated multi-millennial Imperial characteristics.

The moral failure to leave an Imperial Japan undefeated to prosecute a nuclear war generations hence was intolerable. The expectation of continuing 400,000 civilian and military deaths throughout Asia while diplomats dithered was intolerable. Allowing a blockade to operate interminably, while deferring to the War Faction any decision about whether Japanese and allied prisoner deaths met their 20 million standard was intolerable. Allowing the premeditated ignorance of revisionists center stage as the institutional knowledge of the Greatest Generation dies away is intolerable.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Retain Mike. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Flag_This]

Watch the films from Saipan - entire families of Japanese civilians throwing themselves off of cliffs because of the propaganda their government fed them about U.S. forces. An invasion of Japan would have been a bloodbath for the Japanese.

[noinfringers2]

I was a not quite 19 year old infantry replacement standing in a line on Leyte to get battle gear for the coming invasion of Japan. When a slightly older Lt. came out and told us to go back to our tents because the war was over there was a feeling of relief. However, for me there was some mixed emotions because I would never get the opportunity to try for revenge over my one and only older brother being killed on Okinawa. I am very honest in my feelings that at the time I wanted to kill as many and any Japs as possible and I believe many if not most of the infantry being prepared for the invasion felt the same. Our training was to be killers. We were told and realized the invasion would be costly in lives on both sides. I suppose some had serious trepidation but for me and many others it was ‘lets get it on’. No doubt the atomic bombs saved many millions of lives by taking out a fewer amount. I have never felt remorse over the Jap lives lost in the war because I grew up knowing about the heinous actions of the Jap soldiers and watched as the Jap civilians praised their warriors.

[Kevmo]

Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan was Unavoidable
***Of course it was avoidable. All we needed to do was to accept ~1M American casualties.

Here’s a simple question: How many Americans died in the 2 2 dropped atom bomb missions? The ratio to dead enemy to dead Americans was way more than 100X better than any other mission in Japan. That’s because NO Americans lost their lives in the raid. Previous raids cost dozens of American lives.

[DFG]

My wife and I got to meet General Tibbets about 15 years ago at an airshow.

[patriot08]

There has to be something inherently wrong with a society capable of such atrocities as the Japanese

The Massacre, Rape and Plunder of Nanking

http://www.olive-drab.com/od_history_ww2_ops_battles_1937nanking.php

Japanese forces advanced towards Nanking from Shanghai, attacking from three directions on 25 November. The Chinese General Tang Sheng Zhi commanded an army of over a hundred thousand men, but they were poorly led by officers who deserted as the fighting intensified. When the city fell on 13 December 1937, a third of the Chinese Army was still within the walls, shedding their uniforms and trying to hide among the civilians.

For a period of six weeks after the fall of Nanking, the Chinese were not simply murdered. They were tortured, brutalized, and raped. The Japanese used every variety of murder. Chinese victims were:

•Chased into the Yangtze River with machine guns, drowning them
•Drenched with gasoline, then shot so they burned like candles
•Mutilated by cutting off testicles or gouging out eyeballs, then burned while alive
•Tied to posts in groups, then executed with grenades or machine guns.
•Covered with acid until dead from the corrosive effects
•Attacked with awls or other tools or clubs
•Eviscerated and confronted with their internal organs
•Beheaded in swordplay displays by Japanese officers
•Used for grotesque experiments by Japanese doctors and scientists
Women and babies were singled out for special tortures:

•Women were beaten on the vagina with fists and other objects until dead
•Babies were skewered and tossed into boiling water
•Fetuses were cut from living pregnant women and put into jars of preservative
•Large numbers of women were gang raped and tortured, then killed
•Rape victims left alive had their stomachs cut open or their breasts chopped off
•Women were kept as sex slaves at the service of any Japanese man
Japanese soldiers laughingly made games out of these atrocities. Japanese officers organized contests to see what soldier could kill the most Chinese in a given time with numbers as high as 500 required to win. Tokyo newspapers, such as Nichi-nichi, printed stories about the contests with pride and praise for winners.

The Japanese government also sponsored bombings on villages to test germ warfare agents for later use on the United States.

[Mark17]

a survivor of the death march

I have no doubt they would all have been murdered. My uncle, for whom I am named, did not survive the Death March. I consider the Philippines to be my adopted country, and plan to retire there soon.

[Uncle Chip]

In retrospect it was the merciful thing to do. Far fewer Japanese died in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings than would have died in an American invasion. It’s that simple.

[PzLdr]

My Pop. combat engineer, 4th I.D, was scheduled, with his division to get shipped to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. Why? The “practice” they’d had on Urtah Beach on June 6th. Talk about one happy camper.

As for remembering Hiroshima, my uncle was killed on Guam. He would have never been there if the Japs hadn’t started the Pacific war. So every year, I commemorate the bombing. I have a pint of fried rice.

[J.Deere Man]

Some historians belief that Truman had another consideration in addition to saving as many lives as he could. Russia was about to enter the war against Japan and Truman wanted the war over before the Russians could get involved. As it is they occupied several Japanese Islands and have never returned them. Whatever the reasons involved Truman did the right thing.

[FoxPro]

If it wasn’t for the atomic bombs, I would not been born.

[Rockingham]

Good post. I offer four additional points:

(1) Japan sought to develop an atomic bomb but failed due to inadequate resources and time. The effort though revealed Japan's lack of moral qualms about using atomic warfare against the US and others had they succeeded.

(2) The Japanese intended to kill all their prisoners of war as soon as the US invaded. As it was, US military prisoners held by the Japanese were treated brutally and suffered a 40 per cent death rate, which compares to a 1 per cent death rate suffered by US military prisoners held by the Nazis.

(3) The Japanese leadership, through intelligence sources and their atomic weapons research, knew that the US was ready and poised to use atomic bombs on the Japanese homeland. Surrender was discussed but not seen as necessary because US atomic bombs were judged as not militarily decisive due to the damage already inflicted by US air raids, the movement of key war industry plants to impervious deep mountain tunnels, and the low US production rate for atomic bombs.

(4) Immediately after the war, in order to deflect guilt for starting the war and for extraordinary brutality in waging it, Japan's leaders instructed their domestic allies and embassies abroad to propagandize against nuclear warfare as uniquely horrific. Perversely, this worked to develop sympathy for Japan despite its moral culpability. America's news media still annually discuss the atomic bombing of Japan as morally questionable, while the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, biological warfare against the Chinese, and many other Japanese atrocities are infrequently mentioned even in that context.

[Retain Mike]

You folks make some great points. I am already at 805 words, so I doubt a piece this long piece will ever see the light of day and I see I only allude to your stories with a sentence at best. Thank you for your interest.

[God luvs America]

as per #4- it was as much the fault of that moron Douglas MacArthur that the Japs got off easy as much as anything else...from Unit 731 to everything else you mentioned, no one was feeling sorry for the Japs yet at the same time there was little pressure placed on them to really pay for their atrocities...were the world constantly reminded of Jap atrocities were constantly the way we are constantly reminded of the Holocaust, Japan would never be able to live it down...

[A_Former_Democrat]

Excellent points. Add to it, there hasn’t been a world war since and the bomb has clearly been a deterrent. Upwards of 72 million people died over the idol-worship of 3 humans (sub-humans). Instead of railing against the bomb, the focus ought to be on never, ever again of treating any individual(s) as messiah-types, especially those who’s history indicates a philosophy of centralized power.

Never, ever.

[A_Former_Democrat]

Every one, adults and kids, should have to watch and discuss film clips, photos and narratives of WW II, esp the war in the Pacific. 17 year olds hitting the beaches of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Normandy. I can’t even begin to fathom the terror. The USS Indianapolis. Pearl Harbor, the battle for Berlin.

And this ingrate punk wants an “apology”? Good Lord there are some really stupid brainwashed idiots in our midst.

[Retain Mike]

Your comment about the title makes much more sense in terms of what the narrative says. I changed it to “Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan Was Imperative”. Thank you.

[Rockingham]

The handful of war crimes prosecutions that MacArthur initiated so roiled relations with the Japanese that a larger effort was seen as inadvisable. In that, and much else, the developing Cold War clash with Communism overshadowed the post-war settlement with Japan.

Wisely, MacArthur vetoed Russian participation in the Japanese occupation and secured the basis for Japan eventually becoming a reliable ally of the US. MacArthur even provided for a constitution for Japan that was, by American standards, well to the Left, with key parts written by Norman Cousins no less.

MacArthur has much to answer for. I am not sure though that he and the US could have insisted on wide scale war crimes prosecutions without doing damage to compelling strategic interests.

[Rockingham]

Unfortunately, a large slice of the human race remains in thrall to toxic beliefs and leaders. At least for now, we are better armed and have the upper hand.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

Your dad did good making his point to the classic liberal waste of oxygen holding the clipboard.