Posted on 08/06/2010 7:02:21 AM PDT by AccuracyAcademia
This week marks 65 years since the United States dropped the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, President Harry Truman delivered a “rain of ruin” upon Hiroshima, Japan, with Nagasaki hit three days later, killing 100,000 to 200,000.
Truman’s objective was to compel surrender from an intransigent enemy that refused to halt its naked aggression. The barbarous mentality of 1940s Japan was beyond belief. An entire nation lost its mind, consumed by a ferocious militarism and hell-bent on suicide. Facing such fanaticism, Truman felt no alternative but to use the bomb. As George C. Marshall put it, the Allies needed something extraordinary “to shock [the Japanese] into action.” Nothing else was working. Japan was committed to a downward death spiral, with no end in sight.
“We had to end the war,” said a desperate Marshall later. “We had to save American lives.”
Evidence shows the bomb achieved precisely that, saving millions of lives, not merely Americans but Japanese. The Japanese themselves acknowledged this, from the likes of Toshikazu Kase to Emperor Hirohito himself. Kase was among the high-level officials representing Japan at its formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri. “The capitulation of Japan,” Kase said definitively, “saved the lives of several million men.”
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
Where is Truman now? We could really use his guidance!
*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Hitler[AoE]: wtf?
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*
*The Allied team has won the game!*
Eisenhower: awesome!
Churchill: gg noobs no re
T0J0: thats bull**** u fockin suck
*T0J0 has left the game.*
But WW-II was over before those two bombs were dropped. Japan's 75 largest cities were in ashes and the bomb which had done that was a ten or twelve pound thing with crepe paper streamers to guide it. There was an army without any means of supply sitting around in China, a maritime nation whose entire navy and merchant marine had been destroyed, and 20 million people walking around in forests because the cities they used to live in were gone.
I'd have saved the two A bombs for Mecca and Medina.
Awesome...!
This is even better - WWII on Facebook for Teens
http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/world-war-ii-facebook-version/
Consider this, the Soviets had just declared war on Japan, had we not dropped the bombs, they would have taken their half of Japan, then inevitably there would have been a bloody civil war, just like in Korea with the ChiComs getting involved.
That is totally awesome!
At Truman's urging and insistence. There was no need. Consider also the 100 American carriers in the region at the time and what Russia would have had available to even try to get to Japan had we not wanted them there (inner tubes, canoes, rafts...)...
YOU ARE F*CKING CLUELESS!
Those two bombs saved 800,000 American lives and 10X that many Japanese who would have fought to the death.
Pray for America
Do you find being an idiot painful?
Thank you for that. I was fortunate enough to be standing behind FiFi as she started her engines during an airshow years ago. It was 10 minutes of propwash bliss before she taxied to the runway.
At approximately 9:00am CST 5 August 2010 “FIFI” returned to the air for the first time in over four years. An uneventful 39 minute flight was recorded. Further flights are planned for the next several days to further test the aircraft and allow the pilots and crews to once again become current.
LEST WE FORGET.....
Do you find being a useful idiot painful?
Unfinished Business
For 65 years, Japanese corporations have escaped responsibility for abusing American POWs during World War II.
Lester Tenney entered World War II as a strapping 21-year-old, weight 180 pounds. By the time he emerged from Japanese captivity in 1945, he was a shattered, emaciated cripple. His left arm and shoulder were partly paralyzed due to an accident in a coal mine where he'd been sent as a slave laborer. His overseers there -- civilian employees of the Mitsui Corp., not members of the Imperial Army -- had knocked out his teeth in repeated beatings with hammers and pickaxes. At war's end, he weighed in at 98 pounds. It took him a year in U.S. Army hospitals to regain something like a semblance of his old well-being.
Sixty-five years later, Tenney and his fellow ex-prisoners of war (POWs) -- the rapidly diminishing group of those who remain alive, that is -- are still awaiting the full fruits of victory. The Japanese companies that once abused Tenney and his fellow prisoners have never acknowledged responsibility for their crimes, let alone offered compensation or regrets of any kind. (The companies needed the POWs to compensate for a wartime labor shortage.) The Japanese government has only just begun to offer its regrets for what happened -- far too late for most of the veterans, but, still, something. Perhaps most depressingly of all, the U.S. government has spent years allowing the Japanese to get away with it -- a policy of complicity that has its roots in the two countries' complex postwar relationship. There are signs that this, too, may finally be changing. Hope never dies, as they say.
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