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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 ...
I think the day is coming when the only thing they will teach kids about WWII are:
The Soviet Union won the war on their own, with little help from us
Dresden
The Internment of Japanese Citizens
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Given the circumstances it was the most compassionate act possible for everyone involved. It prevented suffering and death on both sides on a scale that would have dwarfed the destruction the bombs caused.
The moral question would be whether the killing of the civilians was directly intended or was it foreseen but not intended. The people who justify the bombing of Hiroshima would have to show that the killing of the civilian population was not meant as a means to an end.
In other words, what was the target?
If the target was the city of Hiroshima, together with its population, the act is condemned.
On the other hand, some have argued that the target was certain massive military assets in Hiroshima. In this case, the destruction of those assets would have been justifiable. They would say the collateral deaths were first of all not intended, and secondly, proportional to the aim of bringing the much larger mass killing of WWII to a quicker end.
I believe we should apologize for not having more and used them on russia.
You're saying the killing of the civilians was deliberate, and part of the overall intent to shock the Japanese military / imperial leadership in a unique and unprecedented way.
That part about the submarine officer is interesting. Would the defenders of the bombing have said that the military targets they obliterated in Hiroshima were of significantly greater strategic military value than the submarine base?
The U.S., as I understand it, leafletted the city of Hiroshima (and a dozen or so other cities) saying that the inhabitants should evacuate. Was it ever even physically possible for them to evacuate? And ---this is speculation but --- if they had, would the U.S. still have targeted Hiroshima rather than some other possible target site?
In other words, was it precisely the presence of all those people which helped make Hiroshima a target of choice?
It's also been argued that, anticipating the invasion of the southern island of Kyushu, the Japanese prepared Operation Decision (Ketsu-Go) which envisaged the deployment of over 2 million troops along the coast to repel Allied landings. Do you think using the atomic bomb on these massed troops, causing say 2x the amount of (military)troop deaths on Kyushu, than the number of civilian deaths at Hiroshima, would have been justified?
To answer it myself: I think so.
Do we know what the actual target was? We know where the bombs hit, but where were they 'aimed'.
I put quotes on aimed because our bombing accuracy at that point in time was extremely low.
Because the Japanese would be extremely aggressive, and interpolating from the way they defended any Islands we invaded, in defending their homeland it was estimated at the time that 1,000,000 American troops and that many more Japanese military and civilians would die during an invasion.
Not only that, we killed far more people destroyed much more property with our incendiary bombing of Japan.
A number of people were killed, as these finatics attempted to find and destroy the Imperial rescript (a recording of the Emperor's capitulation for radio broadcast to the Japanese people). This recording was hidden for several days by a couple of very brave servants during the coup and eventually, after the coup began to fall apart, was spirited into the radio station, and transmitted.
Only then could the plotters no longer maintain that they were acting on behalf of Hirohito, who they had claimed was being "betrayed by a cabal of cowards in the cabinet."
The story of the coup itself makes fascinating reading, but I just can't remember the name of the book, after all these years. I'll bet it could be found on the internet, though.
What is the name of the book, please?
Do you think there is some way to tell what a person intends by analyzing their actions and choices? Or can intent simply be a person's verbal description --- one of may possible descriptions --- of what he was doing, and why?
I actually tried to digest G.E.M. Anscomb's book "Intention" to get to the bottom of this, but it didn't help. I could not grasp what she was getting at. (I'm not, generally, deficient in reading comprehension, but I was definitely stupid in relation to Anscombe's book!) Could you recommend some relatively straightforward reading on this?
RE: What may not be widely known is that after the first bomb was dropped, and the Emperor’s advisers were attempting to end the war, a coup was begun by a number of military field-grade officers.
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I think you are referring to the Kyujo Incident (Kuyjo Jiken). That was an attempted military coup d’etat in Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened on the night of 14 August 1945, just prior to announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allies. The attempted coup was put into effect by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and by many from the Imperial Guard of Japan in order to stop the move to surrender.
The officers, in an attempt to block the decision to surrender to the Allies, killed Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori of the First Imperial Guards Division and attempted to counterfeit an order from Hirohito.
They attempted to place the Emperor under house arrest, using the 2nd Brigade Imperial Guard Infantry. They failed to persuade the Eastern District Army (Japan) and the high command of the Imperial Japanese Army to move forward with the action. Due to their failure to convince the remaining army to oust the Imperial House of Japan, they ultimately committed suicide in traditional Japanese form.
The following books give an account of this:
1) Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire Paperback by Richard B. Frank
2) Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict, 1853-1952 Hardcover by Edwin Palmer Hoyt
Superfortress: The Boeing B-29 & American Airpower in World War II
In the case of Hiroshima they were aimed at a steel mill. I don't recall for Nagasaki. In both cases, however, the city itself, rather than a primarily military installation, was the target.
This can get tricky. If I'm attacked by a criminal, I may intend to shoot the criminal, but if I'm a poor shot, I may inadvertently hit an innocent bystander. That wasn't my intention, but it was the outcome. In that case I'd hate to be judged by the outcome.
It gets even trickier when you aim at a legitimate target, knowing that there will be collateral damage among innocent bystanders. The objection raised is, "How can you say you didn't intend to kill those bystanders when you know it would happen?" The answer is, did the good effect of my attack (destroying a factory, blowing up a train, whatever) follow in any way from the deaths of the bystanders? If I could have achieved all of my purpose even had the bystanders been miraculously removed from the scene, then killing them was not part of my intention. However, if any part of my benefit derives from killing someone, such as by depriving war industries of workers, then that outcome has to be counted as part of my intention.
However, in the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the obliteration bombing of Dresden, the intention was clear from the outset. The aiming points given the bombardiers were chosen such that bombs were to fall on civilian housing, non-military industries, etc. The stated intent was to wipe out the cities and their inhabitants.
Anscombe has a lot of good stuff, but basically she's a philospher, You have to be pretty deep into philosophy (I'm not) to understand much of what she says. I recommend The Just War Tradition by Corey and Charles; Law and War by Peter Maguire; and Just and Unjust Wars by Walzer. The latter is particularly interesting because Walzer is an atheist and derives Just War entirely from the Natural Law tradition, with not so much as a gesture to Aquinas or any of the other Christian scholars of Just War.
Hope that helps.
Yes, I would say that using an atomic bomb on massed troops deployed to prevent an invasion would have been justified, even though there might be heavy collateral damage among innocent civilians. The guilt, if any, would have fallen on the Japanese government for not evacuating the civilians from what was going to be a battlefield.
In my book A Fighting Chance, I trace how the mid-1930s goal of precision bombing of strategic targets degenerated into city-busting by the mid-1940s. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply the outcome of that degeneration.
FWIW, I spent a good portion of my USAF career working on precision bombing systems, both radar and inertial. We were trying to get back to the 1930s goal, but it turned out to be a lot harder than anyone realized. today's laser-guided bombs and artillery shells are finally delivering what air power pioneers had hoped for nearly a century ago.
I believe Operation TORCH was the code name of the Allied invasion of North Africa in Nov 1942.
Some statements from the major decision-makers suggest that their intention was not to destroy particular strategic military assets in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was to break Japan on the psychological level, through horror. And I think one can know this by looking at the weapons they chose (inherently, intentionally, indiscriminately destructive in theory and in practice) and seeing where they chose to use them. If they had used them on Kyushu, they might have killed 2 million Japanese troops instead of 200,000 Japanese civilians, but it would have been justifiable. But they chose to incinerate civilians instead, to maximize the psychological impact.
I further think that the frank consequentialism of the "target = city" bombings --- the underlying belief that innocent human lives can be targeted and directly intentionally killed, "if it works" --- helped build our abortion regime.
Our abortion culture did not come from the demands of oops-I'm-pregnant 20 year old Starbucks baristas. It came from the demand of a very highly motivated, very small Malthusian-eugenic elite who want a no-limits ethic and total control.
Anything -- they would say --- can be justified "if it works", if it achieves good consequences. That is their intention: to avoid the miseries of random human breeding, "overpopulation" and so forth, and achieve a controlled utopian society, where no one draws breath except the planned, the perfect and the privileged. They haven't achieved that yet, of course: but they certainly have good intentions by the ton.
The designated aim point for Little Boy was a bridge where a river split in two. That was basically the center of the city and very easy to spot from the aircraft. The weather was near perfect and the bomb was drop on that aim point. The exact hypocenter was located a little southeast of the bridge.
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