Thanks for posting this image. I think it is a thing of beauty. An eye for an eye...
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Posted on 05/04/2024 7:00:50 PM PDT by DoodleBob
During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Tucker Carlson made a bold claim about the August 1945 decision by the United States to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a move that effectively put an end World War II. He said:
My ‘side’ has spent the last 80 years defending the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilians… like, are you joking? If you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil.
I like Tucker Carlson and find myself in agreement with him on many topics. I am especially heartened by his recent rediscovery of faith and a robustly Christian worldview. But on the nuclear bombing of Japan, I believe he vastly overstates his case.
It’s not surprising that Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson spoke on this issue. Atomic warfare has recently been a subject of burgeoning cultural interest, first with last year’s award-winning biopic Oppenheimer and more recently with the release of Amazon Prime’s TV series adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game Fallout.
In fact, Westerners have been bombarded with apocalyptic messaging more generally for years—whether on COVID-19, or the so-called “race reckoning,” or climate alarmism.
It would not be surprising if our existential fears for the future are blurring our vision of the past.
With that said, is it true—not only that America was evil to bomb Japan in 1945—but that those who defend that decision are evil themselves?
Reaching this conclusion requires a rewrite of the historical context surrounding World War II: a wishful-thinking reprise of events that assumes diplomacy with Japan was a viable path to end the war. It was not.
In the months leading up to Enola Gay’s fateful flight over Hiroshima, Japan was in retreat all across the Pacific and still had no appetite for surrender. The capital, Tokyo, was already in ruins thanks to a U.S. firebombing raid. Okinawa had been overrun by American troops, and a mainland invasion was now within reach. Astoundingly, even after Little Boy fell on Hiroshima on August 6th and flattened the city, the Japanese leadership refused to countenance surrender.
It was only after Fat Boy annihilated Nagasaki three days later that, resisting a palace coup by hardliners still hoping to fight on, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers.
It was Japan’s deeply embedded cultural ideology—its honor culture–that necessitated such dire action by the U.S. As Mike Coté has explained at Rational Policy:
This intense honor culture was a part of Japanese society going back centuries. It was prominently represented in the samurai way of the warrior—bushido—and was a key aspect of the Japanese desire to fight to the death. Capture was seen as a moral stain on the honor not only of the individual who was captured, but to his entire family tree: past, present, and future. Combine this with the insidious propaganda of the Imperial Japanese government—claims that American troops would massacre and defile civilians, celebrations of kamikaze pilots as heroic sacrifices, and exhortations of suicidal mass resistance to any invading force—and you had a potent brew militating against surrender.
The United States had other options, of course, but they would have been far deadlier. Yielding the entire Pacific region to a bloodthirsty and cruel Japanese regime could hardly pass as compassionate.
Likewise, Operation Downfall, a proposed mainland invasion of Japan, would have required 1.7 million American servicemen fighting up to 2.3 million Japanese troops—and possibly to the death, if Japanese resistance elsewhere was anything to go on.
As President Truman and his war cabinet weighed the decision of atomic warfare, also hanging in the balance were 100,000 prisoners of war whom the Japanese planned to execute the moment a ground invasion began. And with warfare continuing on multiple battlefronts across the Pacific theater, daily deaths on each side of the conflict were reaching into the tens of thousands.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused well over 200,000 casualties with over 100,000 more injured.
The U.S. bombing of Japan was horrific. I have visited ground zero at Hiroshima and pondered long on the horror of that day.
It is true that American imperialism has a mixed legacy. And as the United States slides into spreading moral chaos at home, the nation’s involvement in conflicts abroad appears increasingly dubious. No doubt this consideration was central in Tucker’s rigid remarks.
Still, it is wrong to read today’s headlines into last century’s dilemmas. The decision of the United States to drop atomic bombs on Japan was eminently defensible, and we would be foolish to forget this.
Something my father taught me: Don’t start a fight, but if you get hit, defend yourself, hit back, but harder, and again if necessary.
I haven’t followed Tucker closely, but he seems to have gone cuckoo.
It happened to Glenn Beck.
Some people cannot handle fame or popularity.
Rush seemed to handle the spotlight, but seemed to phone it in towards the end. That is typical for everyone in life. The excitement or interest fades in their iob and life.
Sorry to hear about your dad. but glad the rest worked out for you.
It was horrible. But it was one more horrible act in a sea of them that happened in World War II. No matter how much I hate it, randomly bombing civilians was the norm in WW II. Every country that had the ability to do it did it.
Given that about 10,000 people were dying every day throughout the Asia/Pacific region during the war, ending the war at least months earlier than it otherwise would have ended saved many lives - and that’s to say nothing of how many lives Operation Downfall would have taken. So horrible though it was, I’ve made my peace with it though I will never argue that bombing and incinerating civilians was anything but awful.
The world is massively overpopulated. Use’m if you gottem.
Dropping the bombs saved hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties. It also saved millions of Japanese lives. Full stop.
And, frankly, I don’t understand all the kvetching and Monday-morning quarterbacking.
If Claus von Stauffenberg's attempted assassination of Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944 had been successful - do you think that that would have a net beneficial effect on American interests?
Would it have shortened the war? Maybe.
Would it have dismantled the National-Socialist tyranny and enthrallment of Germany? Questionable.
Would it have led more-quickly to a lasting peace? Doubtful.
Counterfactual history is not my strong suit, but I am not sure that Adolph Hitler's death on July 20, 1944 would have had a net positive effect.
In any event: I respect your position / am not arguing that you must be wrong. Just having some fun with "what-ifs."
Regards,
Of COURSE we were! Just ask ANY college professor today!!
We should have continued to Dresden and flamethrower the guys that attacked us and killed so many of our young men in a oily, fiery death in the waters of Pearl Harbor!
Thanks for posting this image. I think it is a thing of beauty. An eye for an eye...
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The bomb damage to Tokyo was more severe than the Atom Bomb damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
[...] In fact, the German V1 and V2 missile programs were development projects for long-range, precision-guided delivery systems for nuclear weapons. [...]
America expended a massive amount of it's its industrial and technological strength to develop the tech and to build the weapons. [...]
Given that expenditure of resources alone, it was a foregone conclusion that the US would use it's its nuclear weapons as soon as they were developed to make sure that we used ours before the enemy used their atomic weapons on us. [...]
There's a lot to "unpack" there; but let me focus instead on just that one assertion, which I think represents a gross distortion of the truth:
1. Because of weight constraints, neither the V-1 nor the V-2 could ever have carried a 1940s-era nuke - and certainly not any hypothetical German nuke. No documentation exists indicating that the Nazis ever envisaged mounting a nuclear warhead on either the V-1 or the V-2. Nor did the Nazis ever deploy any aircraft capable of delivering such a bomb.
2. German scientists were much farther away from developing a workable A-Bomb than was generally believed at the time by the U.S. experts. One might assert that the U.S. experts were acting out of an "abundance of caution," and I won't criticize them for that. But over the years, in the collective mind of the American public, the specious belief that the Nazis had more than a snowflake's chance in Hell to develop any nuclear device - let alone a warhead capable of being delivered by air - has, sadly, taken root.
Regards,
The International Takeout should read: Dumbass Takeout........
“Saved Japan from Soviet occupation in the North”
The Soviets launched their Manchurian campaign on 09AUG45. There is good reason to believe that had a larger impact on the decision to surrender than the second bomb.
He*& NO!
The Japanese make an unprovoked attack on the US and HAD BEEN doing as much and worse all over S. E. Asia.
Did do no one ever hear of the Btan Death March?
Your rendition of WWII is from how history was written. I remember it in actuality. Either rendition can be correct or somewhat skewed. At the time, consensus was the bomb was too terrible and the aftermath was where no one had been before.
The United States had lost enough soldiers.. When Japan attacked the United States, and our ships, with our men and women on them.. Not prepared and overlooking indications of an attack, and it being shown on theater news, Truman was ready to end war or threat of war.. With the bomb. At the time, the thought of dropping it on any city was not a good idea.. It was horrible, but we didn’t start it. Japan would not stop until... They realized..
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
No. It likely saved more American and Japanese military casualties and Japanese civilian casualties than a full scale invasion and fight for the main Japanese Islands would have wrought. In part not merely what the U.S. would have needed to do, but how the Japanese military would have operated trying to thwart the American invasion. If you think Rafa in Gaza is a tragedy today, imagine Tokyo in a similar fight.
“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.”
- Norman Cousins
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.”
— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
“The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950
The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.
— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.
— Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946
But what would these guys know, right?
No contest. In your scenario said Marine would already likely have experienced combat with the seasoned Japanese warrior. Definitely nuke ‘em.
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