Posted on 08/06/2013 7:48:46 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
August 6, 2013 marks the 68th anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb, and August 9th the last. Japan did not surrender for five days after Nagasaki was bombed, during which time the Soviet Union declared war and the Americans conducted additional, conventional firebombing raids on a Japanese city. Emperor Hirohito was asked to break a deadlock in the imperial cabinet that had blocked an unconditional surrender up to that point.
To this day, Harry Truman is viewed by ardent critics as a war criminal and the United States is deemed as being stained by a sin as indelible as slavery. In fact, last November, a "documentary" on Hiroshima and its aftermath produced by Oliver Stone was shown on television and, as might be expected, it presented the standard apologist's take on the history surrounding Truman's decision to use nuclear bombs.
To quote Stone from an interview he gave to the Stanford Daily earlier this year, his production was intended to "cause Americans to rethink your history ... because you're not the indispensable, benevolent nation that we pretend to be." He might have gotten his facts straight before making such an arrogant and ignorant comment, but as we know from his past works, facts seem to get in the way of his agenda.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Estimates at the time were that Allied troops could suffer a million casualties, if we had to launch a conventional invasion of the Japanese home islands. And untold Japanese also would have died in such an invasion.
The bombings actually saved lives in the long run.
Japan isn’t mad at us, in fact they are a strong ally.
Well, as far as being a Devil’s alternative, you are missing one important point.
They started that war. Truman’s goal was to finish it.
Those bombs saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. The Japanese are at fault, first for starting the war, and second, for not surrendering after the first bomb. The scientists and engineers who built the bombs are heroes. Germany and Japan wouldn’t have hesitated to use atomic bombs, and they would have developed them if the war had gone on many more years.
Some people are just too wedded to their liberal idiocy to think through things rationally.
Operations Olympic and Coronet,the invasion of the Japanese Mainland would have cost the lives of Hundreads of thousands of. American Troops and many more. Wounded.
Thank God those bombs were developed at that time and thank Boeing for. building the only plane that could have carried it,the B-29 Superfortress.
"Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." -
Para 81, Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.
My Dad was steaming for the Japanese home islands aboard the carrier Ticonderoga. They were going to use navy personnel as infantry and he had been told he would be carrying a BAR because he was big and strong. If you remember, they expected to take a million casualties in that invasion. I likely am here and alive today BECAUSE they used the bomb. There are NO apologies in order.
Correct. The official Air Force figures were 40 k dead from initial effects. 140k in Tokyo March 6 1945 firebombing. The number of dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki keep growing. A 97 year old survivor dies of cancer and his death gets added.
I believe we would have had to fight twice in Japan, if not for the Bomb.
The first time to get rid of Tojo and Company.
The second time to stop a Communist takeover of Japan, because it would have been divided, just like Korea.
Commander Fuchida, who led the Pearl Harbor attack, later converted to Christianity and visited Tibbets. He told Tibbets he did the right thing, and that the Japanese were fanatical and an invasion would have cost millions of lives.
And part of Just War doctrine.
I interviewed a guy who was a Higgins boat driver in the Pacific in 1945 and was going to be taking troops to the shore of Honshu. He said when word came out on the ship about the bomb, wild cheering broke out, because those men knew they weren’t going to die in an invasion.
Having had the honor of meeting the late General Paul Tibbets, the man was a straight-up hero.
Numerous and multiple sources on the Japanese side have indicated that without the atomic weapon, they would not, and possibly could not, have stopped fighting until the country was completely conquered.
Read a book written by ???David??? McCullough on Truman. According to Truman (I do not purport this to be the exact quote):
“I made the best decision I could at the time with the information I had.”
I think there is no question that he got it right, even though he was a Democrat.
“Any regret can easily be negated this way: Japan picked a fight with the wrong nation. Period.”
I remember a Sunday dinner conversation many years ago at which my uncle, who fought in the Pacific against the Japanese, was present. One of the women at the table said something like “Wasn’t it terrible that all of those people died in the bombings in Japan?” My uncle replied, “Well, they asked for it.”
A nuclear bomb is NOT the end of the world. The bombs SAVED something like 8,000,000 lives. It was a GOOD thing. Remember, we didn’t start that fight, but we sure finished it.
http://www.timepass69.com/start4-s1113/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-today
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