Posted on 03/06/2010 11:47:41 AM PST by navysealdad
Funny, I didn’t see Hirohito in that clip like Pres. Obama said he was.
bump
hundreds of B-29 Superfortresses flew overhead afterwards, and was quite an airshow of strength.
I also remember reading about how they had covered up all gun emplacements in Tokyo Bay with white sheets before the surrender. A few noted military men said that Tokyo Bay looked like one giant checkerboard, and were thankful they never had to invade Japan.
POTUS Obama knows absolutely zilch about American history other then that taught by Saul Alinsky, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres, etc. And, War World II knowledge is zilch, zero, nothing. If you asked him who “Hap” Aronold or “Jimmy” Doolittle were, his answer would be. “Duh, cartoon characters”???? What a guy!???
And the USS Missouri’s 16 inch guns were at “port” high position. I think some of the Japanese delegation returned to Tokyo and were looked on with disgrace by citizens. We would have pasted them, at great cost to both sides.
THANKS !
Should be recommended viewing for all school age children.
Thank You for posting this remarkable piece of our History.
Thanks Northern Yankee. Had the Bomb not made it in time, or just remained unused, the land invasion would have been hideously costly — but of course would have been preceded by conventional firebombing, which had nearly leveled almost four dozen Japanese cities and killed tens or hundreds of thousands. The island would have been cut off from needed supplies, starved out, deurbanized, disarmed (the hard way), and, okay, so now I’m starting to get the blue light going, I’d better stop... ;’)
Wow.
I liked the part in MacArthur's speech where he says something like “The issues involving different ideals and ideologies has been determined on the battlefields of the world, and are not for our discussion or debate. The surrender documents in front of us contain the terms that are given and to be received.”
My old tagline was “Peace through Victory”. A total victory really did provide for a long-lasting peace with both Germany and Japan. Not the half-measures taken in so many other conflicts (Israel/Palestinians comes to mind).
I read somewhere that they had to scrounge the ship for a suitable table. They ended up using a table (maybe two tables shoved together?) from the kitchen used to prepare the food. With a cover tossed over it to make it presentable.
My father flew B-29's out of Guam. A great story to read about the Japanese surrender and how it was almost thwarted is the book, The Last Mission, by James Smith. My father took part in that mission.
Lost an engine coming back from the bombing mission and had to land at Iwo. A tricky thing to do with those short runways.
Thanks!
I also read how Halsey didn’t even want to look at the delegation.
Not only that, but most likely the Soviets would have gotten involved, and then you would have probably had a Japanese Civil War afterwards, ala Korea.
Thanks for the clip.
I heard tha Obama got his Hirohito reference from the following Senator [Bluto Blutarski], who once famously said:
"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"
I remember one of the Japanese diplomats who was there later said that when he looked at all the foreign nations that were represented, he wondered “How in the world did we ever think we’d beat all of these people?”.
I noticed on a film clip of a recent visit to Japan by some U.S. politician, one of the Jap (intentional) reporters asked the perennial question, “Do you think using the atomic bomb on Japan was right?” I forgot how the guy tap-danced around it, but I would have been in their face.
To wit: “If we had not dropped the atom bombs, you, and probably half the people here would not have been born as your parents would have killed themselves in suicide attacks against the allies. We would still have today a North and South Japan with the North ruled by the Russians. I would also request that you ask the people who suffered under Japanese occupation if we made the right decision. When they were asked, they responded, “Why did you drop only two?” The final question would be to ask those Japanese professional victims if Japan would have used the bomb on us to save the emperor. We should be “in your face” over this lay-the-guilt-trip-on-the-Americans routine.
One wonders how long Harry Truman and the Democrats would have lasted if they hadn’t dropped the bomb, suffered all those invasion casualties (Jap prison commanders were instructed to kill all prisoners if they heard Japan was invaded) and the public found out we had them and didn’t use them.
Yeah, that’s a good point — even after 40+ cities had been incinerated by firebombing, and two cities obliterated by single nuclear bombs — and unable to know that the US had exhausted its arsenal of nukes — there were still those who wanted to continue to fight. The idea that they were entirely beaten and that the nukes weren’t “necessary” is so dopey it’s difficult to believe there are those who still purport to believe it. The rest of the victims of the Japanese were largely Asians, and if the US had built fifty nuclear weapons, hardly a tear would have been shed if we’d had to use them against a Japan that refused to surrender.
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