Imperative
That dance song “You Dropped The Bomb On Me!” by The Gap Band comes to mind.
We killed and damaged more in the fire raids of Tokyo than Hiroshima and Nagasaki with far fewer Americans, and that's what I care about, put in peril.
Japan started the war and we finished it.
If we'd conducted Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan in the same manner the world would be a different place.
The Japanese had developed an atomic weapon.
Please ask a mod to correct the spelling of “imparative” to
“imperative.”
There were three choices:
Invasion. Lots of deaths. Lots of civilian deaths. Lots and lots of money. And we would have lost Korea, China, and half of Japan to the Russians.
Starve them, bomb them. Lots of time. ALL civilian deaths. We would have lost half the territory to the Russians. The Japanese people would effectively be wiped from the earth.
Nuke them. The cost was sunk. Minimal time. The lowest casualties. No dealing with Stalin.
Seems like a no brainer to me.
Imperative. My bad. Spelling errors is a peeve of mine..
Norman Cousins, the famed author and magazine editor, who was an aide to MacArthur, would later reveal: “MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed....When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
Settled science.
I feel for the Japanese people, when thoughts of The Bombs come up. But it was necessary. As Gene Hackmans character said in that movie with Denzel Washington (Crimson Tide)... “Would I have dropped The Bomb? Hell yes sir! I’da dropped the f*cker TWICE!”
I’ve had discussions over the years with people about this. Some say that we should not have dropped the bombs, because Japan was already so weak and on the verge of surrender.
Some say we should have dropped a bomb offshore in the Pacific somewhere, to show the Japanese the power of the bomb we had, and tell them if they don’t surrender, we will use these bombs for real on them. I don’t know how well that would have worked, because we only had a handful of bombs ready to go at that point in time. And then we would have had one less to use for real, if we did the demonstration, but the Japanese called our bluff.
No question. But, every so often, some prick will insert the question into a discussion, “Do you realize that we are the only ones to ever do such a thing?” And shock and awe and shame will follow for many.
That’s what my father always told me. That we had to nuke them or lose countless American lives.
Today, Japan is an ally and a model country, I believe.
They certainly aren’t the ones who unleashed Covid upon the world.
Sorry, just feeling a little ticked off at China in the wake of this endless mask-wearing.
I figure we owe them another one for Yoko Ono.
The alternative was a land blockade and invasion and going house-to-house and killing everybody along the way until Japan surrendered.
My father was in the US Army during WW2 and involved in two amphibious landings on Japanese held islands. Yes, he landed with Marines, but the Army was still there.
He saw first hand the horror that was island warfare in the Pacific. He felt that he might not have survived a landing on mainland Japan.
From what I have read, the Japanese military did not want the Emperor to surrender. It took dramatic events, such as the invasion by Russia and the Atomic bombs to pull the rug out from under the military opposing surrender.
There was a very interesting book I read about psychological warfare in the Pacific during WW2. https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/you-can‘t-fight-tanks-with-bayonets/
The full title of the book is “You Can't Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare against the Japanese Army in the Southwest Pacific (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)
The Japanese military leadership was consistently lying to the Japanese soldier and mentally conditioning him to die for the emperor. It took really harsh images to cause the typical soldier to say, wait a minute this is not going to work and is stupid. The most successful image used by the US military was of a Japanese solder without ammunition, without explosives charging a USA tank with a bayonet. The outcome of such stupidity was obvious. On many islands that is what the typical Japanese solider who have no supplies was looking at. The atomic bombs provided those not in the Japanese military leadership with a wake-up call that the war was hopeless; that Americans could destroy every city in Japan with one bomb and Japan could do nothing to stop them.
The Atomic bombs were necessary as a way of providing everyone with something unexpected to point to as saying the war was over. The firebombing of Tokyo and other cities was much more of an uncivilized event than the dropping of two atomic bombs.
Continued firebombing, atomic bombing of other cities, starvation by sea blockage prior to a land invasion would have caused so much death and suffering. This says nothing of those who would have died in the land warfare on the Japanese home islands. The people who died in the two atomic bombs were sacrificed to end the war quickly and to save countless lives.
I got into it with quite a few over in the UK before 911 about us using the bombs on Japan back then. I told them to ask ANY of their WW2 pacific vets about that.
Told them that if we had it a bit sooner, there would have been at least three dropped.
OH THE SHOCK!
At least 1.5 million of our men would have died in the invasion of the home Islands of Japan. At the very least that many.
Why was the aircraft named “Enola Gay”?
A couple of stories about that German uranium oxide we captured. The Japanese changed their plans for it. Instead of building an atom bomb it was going to be used in a dirty bomb attack on SF to be delivered by planes from their I-400 submarine aircraft carriers on one way missions. The Japanese didn’t know that we captured the German U boat and were still expecting the uranium at the time they surrendered. After being briefed about this possible attack, Truman had another reason to drop the bomb.
It’s said that the uranium was quickly shipped to Oak Ridge, processed, and ended up in the core of the bombs dropped on Japan.
It existed. Other countries such as Germany were working on it by had not developed.
That one Bomb, dropped by one plane could destroy a city. This is a very important point. We could do all the testing in the desert we wanted and no one except the scientists would be sure of the level of damage. But drop the Bomb on a city and that city was gone, well that's proof everyone can understand.
Others may not like the result, but fear is the great motivator!
Remember that Missouri's the "Show-Me" state.....