Posted on 05/29/2016 6:29:04 AM PDT by Arthur McGowan
Much of the historical perspective on the era holds that the Japanese were prepared to fight to their very last man, and that until the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been visited upon their homeland Japanese leaders had no intention of surrendering. But in fact the Japanese had sent peace feelers to the West as early as 1942, only six months after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. More would come in a flood long before the fateful use of the atomic bombs.
In her 1956 book, The Enemy at His Back, journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown supplied overwhelming evidence to counter the inaccurate views about the close of the war. Beginning in 1949, she plunged into dozens of wartime memoirs and congressional hearings dealing with the conflict. The wife of noted Washington Star columnist Constantine Brown, Mrs. Brown had access to many of "the men who were no longer 'under wraps,'" as she noted. She wrote, "With this knowledge at hand, I quickly began to see why the war with Japan was unprecedented in all history. Here was an enemy who had been trying to surrender for almost a year before the conflict ended."
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
How hard is it to surrender?
Really, 0 surrendered to Islamic terrorist even though they never quite killing us.
You both are on the money.
Mr. McGowan needs to imagine if he was Truman, and if he decided to withhold the bomb and let a mainland invasion proceed.
Imagine what kind of monster that history would have declared him to be, letting millions of people die instead of ending the war with less than 200K casualties. The same number of casualties, I would add, happened in 2-3 weeks of incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other largely populated Japanese targets.
Maybe Mr. McGowan could sleep well at night after years more of war, like Obama does. Truman, being old school populist pro-American Democrat, probably would not.
About the president in japan.
In college I worked on the paint crew. Often Jack, the retired boss, would come back and help out. Jack had fought in the Pacific in WWII and would tell me some of his war stories. We were talking about thanksgiving plans one day when jack said he would pray at dinner. Jack wasn’t a religious guy so I asked what he would be giving thanks for.
He said, “Every year I thank God for the atomic bomb”. His group was in training for the invasion of Japan when the bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered. Jack and the guys knew the odds of surviving the invasion were slim.
“So you are thankful the bomb saved your life?”
He replied, “Yes, but more than that. We knew they were training women and children to attack us. We were more afraid of having to live the rest of our lives with having killed little kids than the fear of our own deaths.”
The bomb was terrible, but the military was planning on possibly a million US casualties and several million more Japanese soldiers and civilians. In fact, the army ordered so many purple hearts that they are still today awarding medals from 1945.
I notice the whiny lefty revisionist left the scene as soon as knowledgable people began responding to this piece of crap of an article he posted.
because they wanted to end-win the war!
“Maybe Mr. McGowan could sleep well at night after years more of war, like Obama does. Truman, being old school populist pro-American Democrat, probably would not. “
Mr. McGowan, like Obama, gets to sleep safely in his bed far away from anything remotely resembling a battlefield. His biggest worry is what he will have for dinner, not whether or not at 21 yrs old he will be alive for one more day. That worry was for unimportant GIs who should have been willing to die by the thousands so that McGowan and his friends wouldn’t have their moral purity sullied.
They were trying to conditionally surrender. Meaning they were calling the terms of the surrender.
In theirmfavor as to what they had done previously,,in terms of gains and possibly comtinued fighting against the chinese.
Ah. We were to accept their surrender by collaborating with them.
The Japanese were also trying to negotiate at the same time they were conducting the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. So what are we to believe, their actions or their words?
Diplomacy works only when those conducting the negotiations are acting with the authority for their masters to follow through on their promises. That clearly was not the case in Japan. The emperor used diplomacy only as a subterfuge to gain the upper hand, to deceive, and sway world opinion.
Hey, didn’t the same thing just happen with Iran?
“war is the solution our enemies have chosen, and I say, lets give them all they want.” General William T. Sherman.
Useful words in the 1860s, just as useful in the 1940s.
They were originally looking for an armistice, or a negotiated end to the war. That in no way is a surrender.
WWI ended in armistice. Later a peace treaty was signed. Germany never surrendered. This was the objective of the Japanese offers to negotiate.
In a massive miscalculation they thought they could intimidate us into just leaving them alone and to eventually lift our embargo of them.
Boy, did they screw up!
No that is a retreat.
Surrender means putting down all means of battle and giving total submission to the victors.
This quote from the article struck me:
“One of the most compelling was transmitted by General MacArthur to President Roosevelt in January 1945, prior to the Yalta conference. MacArthur's communique stated that the Japanese were willing to surrender under terms which included.”
If Douglas MacArthur said the Japanese were ready to surrender in this communique. I'd believe him.
The main point of the article as I read it was that the Roosevelt Administration was rife with Communist influence. A influence that mirrored the aims of the Soviets. This is a historical fact knowing the affection Roosevelt held towards leftists.
When have American leftists ever been concerned with anything other that establishing a Communist dictatorship in the USA? Wouldn't they sacrifice American lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa if it would suit there cause and in this case help the Soviet Union.
The American people have been betrayed by leftists in our government, self seeking political leaders and even top military leaders for one hundred years now.
If General Marshall was hell bent with other American top brass to utterly destroy the Imperial Japanese Army and Monarchy while at the same time being cheered on by the American left.(Whose allegiance was with the Soviet Union.) Then the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was inevitable.
The American pilots,soldiers, and sailors have been courageous and noble with few exceptions. It is their leaders have been found wanting and corrupt with regularity.
My father was in the China-Burma theater and would have been sent to Japan when the war ended.
If the destruction of Japan was to be accomplished by invasion or nuclear bombs, for the sake my family and others, the bomb was the better means.
So Arthur, I want to be clear in my understanding of your post.
Do you think it is a good or bad that we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
You can tell time but can you respond?
“Estimates I’ve seen have Hiroshima at 135,000 and Nagasaki at 64,000, but there are numbers all over the map so you could well be right. ...”
” ... The death toll itself is something Japan seemed to willing to accept with resignation. ...”
Great uncertainties accompany estimates of fatalities.
The best to date indicate some 80,000 were killed outright at Hiroshima. In the years since, 30,000 to 40,000 deaths have been attributed to long-term complications from injuries sustained in the attack.
Groups opposed to atomic bombs (and groups opposed to American power generally) have been relentless in attempting to lump every death in Hiroshima since 6 Aug 1945 under the category of “caused by The Bomb”, which has created more uncertainty than ever.
Estimates of immediate deaths at Nagasaki run from to 40,000 to 50,000.
Bear in mind that radiation sickness was little understood in 1945. And the problems of fallout (local materials caught in the detonation and caused to be radioactive, falling out of the atmosphere onto surroundings) were not anticipated at all.
We owe Pelham our thanks for noting a vital point: among themselves, Japanese apparently make no great fuss over losses to the atomic bombings. But they seem to enjoy their success in portraying themselves as victims of the heartless (racist, etc) Americans.
In this, they have been assisted by many Americans - Progressive, religious, scientific, paleo-conservative, libertarian, academic, whatnot - who seem unaware they are being played.
One cannot but respect Japanese exploitation of victimology; it is a feature of the age, after all.
But we owe it to forbears, and posterity, to describe posters like Arthur McGowan as what they really are: moral doofuses, and arrogant nitwits.
We had one more available. There were more being built as production had started and would have been ready in about one month.
Had the U.S. not used the bomb in 1945 to break the death-cult that had gripped Imperial Japan, the result would have been a far more destructive nuclear WW III ten or twenty years later. The bomb's use in this case was an unalloyed blessing for both Japan and the world.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.