Posted on 08/08/2015 4:27:51 AM PDT by Kaslin
This week was the 70th anniversary of the United States nuking Hiroshima and as expected, there has been plenty of second guessing, attacks on America, and claims that nuking the Japanese wasn’t necessary.
Understandably perhaps, that’s how the Japanese feel. I can tell you that with certainty because back in 2008, the Japanese equivalent of PBS flew me out to New York to be part of an online discussion between a crowd of Americans and a group of people from Hiroshima. Again, perhaps understandably, the tone from the people of Hiroshima was very self-pitying. They asked us to look at pictures of Hiroshima as if we hadn’t seen them before. They talked about how devastating the attack was for them. It was like they wanted a big apology from all of America because we hit them so hard after their sneak attack.
Let me say something that a lot of people think, but don’t want to say because we’re friendly with Japan now: Japan deserved to be nuked and it deserved it ten times over.
Japan was allied with the Nazis in a war of world conquest that would have exterminated freedom and democracy across the globe if they were successful. The Japanese deliberately starved and slaughtered millions of civilians, they raped children and pregnant women, they forced families to have sex with each other for the fun of it, they tortured and experimented on prisoners of war -- and then there was Pearl Harbor.
Today, we think of the Japanese as polite people who are good at making electronics, cars and monster movies, but during WWII they were just as fanatical and evil as ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, they also had the military, intelligence and organization to inflict their evil on a much wider swath of the planet. They needed to be stopped by any means necessary, that’s exactly what we did and the world, INCLUDING JAPAN, is a much better place for it.
Strategically, it also made sense.
First off, Pearl Harbor needed to be avenged in a manner so terrible that it made our enemies think twice about striking our homeland again. In fact, some might argue that Japan got off light.
“When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” — Admiral Bill Halsey on December 7, 1941
Happily, it didn’t have to come to that and yet Japan was punished for what it did in a way so terrible that it will live on until the end of human history. That’s no small matter because after what we did to Japan, nobody tried going after us again on our home turf until 9/11. What’s 50+ years of going without a strike on America as devastating as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 worth? Actually, quite a lot.
Additionally, since it had become clear that Stalin might be almost as dangerous after the war as Hitler was during it, it was also important for the United States to deal with Japan instead of leaving another strategic, potentially dangerous nation to be conquered by the Soviets. Ultimately, we ended up fighting a cold war instead of a hot war against the Soviets and it’s entirely possible that our willingness to do what it took to subdue Japan scared them enough to play a significant role in that.
Most importantly, we saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. By 1945, the Japanese had essentially been defeated, but they refused to unconditionally surrender. Allowing a nation as dangerous and evil as Japan to rearm, especially after the world’s post-WWI experience with Germany, seemed like little more than an invitation to an even more brutal war in another 20 years.
Initially, America prepared for a ground invasion, but after seeing the ferocity with which Japan defended Okinawa, we realized taking Japan would cost the lives of millions of Japanese and much more importantly, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would die in the process.
When people moan about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan, what they’re really saying is that they’d rather hundreds of thousands of American families had grown up without husbands, fathers and sons than see us use nuclear weapons on a genocidal nation bent on world conquest.
Like most people who second guess the hard choices that are made in war, critics of nuking Japan insist that everything would have just magically worked out. Japan would have just surrendered and everything would have ended without bloodshed.
Of course, back in the real world, Japan was putting all of its resources into fending off an invasion and refused to surrender even AFTER the first nuclear weapon was dropped. After the second nuclear weapon hit Nagasaki, there was an attempted coup designed to prevent that nation’s leaders from giving in. Happily it failed, but it gives you a sense of how determined the Japanese were to keep fighting.
The Japanese weren’t the victims in WWII; they were the bad guys. They were perfectly willing to create a Hell on earth as long as their Emperor got to share time with Hitler in the infernal palace and they were allowed to be his little worker demons torturing the rest of the planet. Don’t feel sorry for Japan because it got nuked; feel sorry for the all the innocent lives that were lost because of that nation’s murderous lust for power.
You wouldn't believe what's being taught in American public schools. The commie teachers have our kids believing we were the aggressors in World War II.
Welcome to FR
Bump
Legend has it that Truman agonized over the decision to drop the bomb. This was not a decision made lightly. But in the end Truman realized that saving thousands of American lives was far more important than the number of Japanese civilian casualties. Truman had to put America first — something the current occupant of the White House won’t do.
We should have executed Hirohito for War Crimes, but didn’t.
It is also very likely that Hokkaido and the eastern half of Honshu would have been invaded by Soviet forces (at our explicit invitation) resulting in a situation parallel to East and West Germany and North and South Korea. Instead we in the west had the enormous human talents of the Japanese, pacified and focused on technological innovations for the benefit of the world, and a military base of operations off the coast of Asia, all to ourselves.
My standard question to those who bemoan the use of nuclear weapons....
If the Japanese or the Nazi’ possessed these weapons and the ability to deliver them, do they believe that either one of these would have would have used them without remorse?
Wiped the smiles right off their faces...They better hope we never do it again. Lesson better be learned.
Truman’s private papers and interviews showed no special agony beyond a natural aversion to regrettable tasks of any war.
Great additional point, again one that you have to know your history to understand. Most people don’t.
The Chinese are quite eager to remind them what happened.
My dad commanded an LCT on Utah Beach. Later, he was XO on an LST. They were headed to the Pacific, crossing the Panama Canal, when the war ended.
Anyway, regardless of how good or bad a president Truman was, I give him credit for making the tough decisions. I just look at Truman, then I look at Obama. No comparison.
This how we need to deal with radical Islam.
I had a friend who was a Marine on Tarawa. He didn’t talk about it much, but one time he did. He said that when they landed, the island was an impenetrable jungle, and when they left, there was not a tree standing. They had all been mowed down by rifle fire. That was what it was like taking land from the Japanese.
The Japanese were in the process of training and arming the entire civilian population of the Home Islands when we dropped The Bomb. Imagine the horror of that invasion. Every person able to walk would have rushed our soldiers, bamboo spear or grenade in hand. We would have had to kill them all. We would have had to kill them all.
EXCELLENT ARTICLE! Thank you for posting! My dad was in the Philippines and preparing for the invasion of Japan.
Thank goodness, because of those bombs, that invasion didn’t happen. It would have been far worse for both us and them.
Dear Japan,
Fuk - u - Shima you
Tptb may be making your nuclear contamination of the pacific ocean and the world a nonstory but for how much longer
One probable result of Hiroshima is that there was not a nuclear exchange between the USSR and the USA. Without that demonstration on a city all the testing in the world might not have been enough to deter the Soviets, or perhaps the USA, from firing nukes when they, and we, had several of them.
Read about the invasion of Okinawa and how tens of thousands of Japanese were ordered to commit suicide rather than surrender to the white Devils
And so they did
I believe there may be memorials at some of the cliffs where women and children jumped to their deaths
Now apply that same edict to the entire Japanese mainland and, with the information available to a 1945 war planner, calculate the Japanese civilian death toll by suicide had an invasion occurred
“You wouldn’t believe the BS that is taught in Jap schools about WWII. Total propaganda. Most Japs don’t even know about Pearl Harbor.”
You wouldn’t believe the BS that is taught in US schools about WWII. Basically nothing, except perhaps about Navaho code talkers and how generally horrible we were - which is why every year, we have to endure the season of second-guessing the atomic bombing of Japan.
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