Posted on 08/10/2013 6:09:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This is what I know.
My father was 22 years old in 1945, and a veteran of the then-very recent Battle of the Bulge. If not for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he would have ended up in the invasion of Japan, and would have likely been killed.
The Japanese were the aggressors and must shoulder the blame for the deaths of all those women and children; they truly reaped what they sowed.
Nanking, the Bataan death march, the Japanese torture of, and experimenting, on American POWs and others. I wish there were no collateral damages at anytime, but......I spent 18 months on Okinawa and did much site seeing. WOW I thank each and every military person involved with that battle. I say this with a clear conscience.
No, they were never intended for use in Germany. Germany’s surrender was already inevitable by April 1st and the successful crossing of the Rhine. They completely collapsed just two weeks later. Hiroshima was 5+ months later.
Trinity wasn’t conducted until July, 4 months after the crossing of the Rhine.
My wife is from the Philippines...Her mother and father had many stories of the cruelty by the average Japanese soldier...Her father hid in the mountains and sometimes had to boil grass for food....He made a batch of it when she was a little girl and she said it was horrible...Her mother told him that the war is over and quit scaring the kids...kinda funny. ;)
“As there will always be the blame America first crowd, aka the enemy within, this vomit is guaranteed to be regurgitated up every year.”
Again, I’m not quite sure what ‘blame America’ first has to do with it?
The question as to whether the Atomic bomb was necessary is not the same as whether the Atomic bomb was morally right or wrong.
I also don’t see how Eisenhower is less of an authority on the state of the war in August in 1945 than Truman. Eisenhower says that the war could have been won without it, then I side with Eisenhower.
I also don’t think that the US was morally wrong to drop the bomb - Japan declared war on the US, not the other way around. The US is entitled to use whatever means they see fit to win the war when it was American citizens who were attacked unprovoked at Pearl Harbour.
It took even more than that, the day Nagasaki was bombed, the Third Fleet was bombarding targets on Honshu, 5 days later 800 B-29s raided Japan, the Japs surrendered the next day.
The 'clear argument' is no such thing. Japan did not accept the Potsdam Declaration until August 10, after both the atomic bombings. Even then, the Japanese could not bring themselves to negotiate directly with the United States, attempting to mediate through the Soviets until their invasion of Manchukuo on August 9.
While it is quite true to state that Truman's decision to drop the bomb was influenced in part to avoid the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific War 90 days after the defeat of Germany as promised by Stalin, to avoid a potential change to the political landscape of East Asia. it also true that the Japanese War Cabinet did not accept the Potsdam Declaration until expressly ordered to do so by Hirohito. Even then, the Kyūjō Incident, an attempted coup, reflected the willingness of certain radicals to continue fighting even after the atomic bombings of two cities and the Soviet invasion of Japanese-controlled territory.
That said, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targets of military significance even in the destruction of 1945 Japan, and Hirohito himself noted the power of atomic weaponry in his 'endure the unendurable' surrender message. Clearly the American nuclear decision played a significant role in Hirohito's decision.
To other facts: Operation Downfall, which consisted of the planned invasion first of southern Japan (Operation Olympic, 1945) and the invasion of the Kantō plain near Tokyo (Operation Coronet, 1946) had a casualty estimate of at least one million, with the numbers rising depending on the extent to which Japanese civilians resisted the invasion. It is also important to note that the Japanese Army was still quite formidable even as late as the summer of 1945, holding huge swaths of occupied China and Manchuria.
The idea that somehow the Japanese would have simply stopped fighting despite increasingly fanatical resistance to Allied power projected across the Pacific is not borne out by any serious scholarly work of which I'm aware.
It is more than defensible to hold the position that without Hirohito's order to accept the Potsdam Declaration, the Japanese would have continued to fight.
The best work on video that I've seen about this issue is Part 25 of "The World at War", entitled simply "The Bomb". Excellent documentary television which features interviews with some of the key contemporaries of the day.
Total Bullsh$t article!!!
It’s all in the book I mentioned. It was intended for Germany because the US thought the Germans had an active nuclear program. Even Japan had one as well. It’s not that the US had an active A-bomb at the time but the development was aimed at Germany first.
nothing like Monday night quarterbacking!
We didn't target Tokyo because 16 square miles of the heart of the city had already been incinerated by the most destructive bombing raid in history at that time.
Tokyo before and after firebombing raids
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other cities had been spared bombing for the specific purpose of illustrating the before and after affect of the A-bomb.
Hiroshima was no worse than Dresden, or Hamburg.
The deliberate incineration of hundreds of thousands of women and children, whether in Germany OR Japan, has caused us to hesitate, when bold action is required, for the last 65 years, and THAT'S a problem.
Being “ready” to surrender and actually doing it are two different things. They were given an ultimatum and they chose not to surrender. They bet on the US to back down from the ultimatum, and they lost.
I disagree completely. The theory that the Japanese might have surrendered becomes meaningless in the face of what would have happened if they *hadn’t* surrendered.
An invasion force of 2,000,000 was needed to capture Japan, with insane loss of life of Americans and Japanese far in excess of the two bombs.
150,000–246,000+ were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
125,000 was the (low-balled) estimate of the dead in the firebombing of Tokyo “Operation Meetinghouse”, far more with the other bombing campaigns against the city. Unlikely with an estimated 1,000,000 wounded.
The Soviet Union also had the intent to demand half of Japan as it had part of Germany, Korea, and Vietnam. But the atomic bombs convinced them to back off.
“It was intended for Germany”
It was never intended at Germany. Trinity wasn’t until July of that year. Until Trinity they had no clue that the bomb would actually work - they had tested and failed.
When one is attacked and being beaten to death then one has every right to use what ever means are at hand to end the conflict!
As the jury a few weeks ago said “Not Guilty!”.
It’s also defensible to say, as Eisenhower did, that their defeat was inevitable. the blockade of Japan was already having a mammoth toll.
The worst kind of Monday Morning quarterbacking.
Indeed. Allied victory was actually inevitable from December 8, 1941.
However, Japanese civilians of the day were also being trained to defend their homes with bamboo spears. Defeat may have been inevitable but the means for achieving that defeat had yet to be found.
So how would it have happened? A blockade of Japan, with ensuing mass starvation? Invasion, to end the war and return America’s citizen soldiers to their regular lives at huge human cost? Or a way to end the war, however cruel it appeared, through projection of irrefutably awesome power?
That was Truman’s choice.
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