Posted on 08/09/2014 1:11:12 AM PDT by right-wing agnostic
Saturday marks the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima – devastating acts that helped bring World War Two to a close. (Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was similarly battered).
The attacks – the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in world history to date – killed tens of thousands of people and shocked the planet with the scale of their destruction.
There has been much controversy over the decision to bomb Japan and some speculation that it might have been racially motivated (given that the U.S. military did not drop such weapons on European civilian targets).
Anti-Japanese discrimination was widespread in the United States long before the war, as exemplified by immigration restrictions the government imposed upon the Japanese (as well as other Asians).
However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Imperial Japanese military threw that animosity into overdrive that lasted well after the second world war.
About 120,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up into internment camps during the war, while propaganda was mass- produced that depicted the Japanese as subhuman and extremely cruel and depraved.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibtimes.com ...
No.
However, the Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust WERE.
Both the Nazis and the Japanese were racists of the sort that would make Simon Lagree look like a civil rights leader.
Bingo! Or if you have more time, and less money to travel, read one of the many good histories of events. I suggest With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E. B. Sledge and The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb by George Feifer.
Fat Man had a “soccer ball” type trigger- HE in a ball shape imploding the core to compress and start the reaction.
Little Boy was a “cannon” type- a tube with the nuke material being driven like a piston to initiate.
Maybe OM can tell us the answer to Your question.
“Racism” is in the eye of the racist, no matter what his/her own race may be, and in an any social, political, or financial gain to be had by use of the accusation thereof.
Were all born the race we will always be, and to go thru life with an inferiority complex about it is futile.
If a group of a different race attacks your country, they are enemy, bent on your destruction, and retaliation should survival-based, not social justice.
Put down the crack pipe for a moment . PLease explain to me why 60,000 Japanese-American kids and their parents needed to be put in camps .
Was the firebombing of Dresden a racist act?
” The roundup was a much for their protection as ours.”
Would you be saying that if YOU or your ancestors has been put in camps ???
Yes.
I’m smart enough to know if my ancestors had been slaughtered I wouldn’t exist.
Fat Man was an “Implosion-type” weapon using a hollow sphere of Plutonium that was surrounded by shaped charges of high explosives. The shaped charges were designed to created a near-perfect implosion wave that crushes the Plutonium sphere to reach critical mass.
Little Boy was a “Gun-Assembled” type weapon that used enriched Uranium. A slug of this Uranium was placed at the end of a cut off gun barrel and fired down the barrel. The other end of the barrel had rings of the Uranium as the target and when the slug entered inside the rings it created the necessary critical mass. A very simple design.
Neither bomb dropped on Japan was an H-Bomb (actually called a Thermonuclear Weapon) as the very first Thermonuclear detonation was on 1 Nov 1952 named Operation Ivy-Mike. The Ivy-Mike design was the brain child of Dr. Edward Teller (a great man that I have had the honor to meet several times while I worked at the Labs).
So? Many of them had loyalties to Japan, just like today’s Hispanics from Mexico that wave the Mexican flag.
You have to put yourself into the context of time and the American and Japanese cultures that existed at that time. Almost all the Japanese Americans at that time still had direct ties to relatives in Japan and were felt to be a potential threat. They could have simply jailed all the adults and older teens and placed the children in foster care. But there was a damn war to fight that was not of American choosing. You’re obviously very young and prone to believing revisionist history or stupid. Japan chose the fight we chose to win. Don’t bother making any further posts to me since you have not addressed any of my points and you have failed to make a point but I responded to each non-point as a course of being fair.
Oh I forgot, stick the crack pipe up your behind.
It was not the Emperor’s rapid surrender that accounts for my dad’s and his 1500 other camp mates’ survival after Nagasaki. Their camp, Fukuoka #17, was just enough out of range (well, 50 miles out, enough to survive in the short term) to comment how that must’ve been “one hell of an ammo dump,” only to see several of their guards lose heart and dessert, presumably to check on their nearby families’ abodes.
After further sacrifice of several prisoners, the guards that remained in the camp were overpowered then torn limb-from-limb by 90-pound men that had endured—and seen their friends succumb to—years of the most horrific torments imaginable.
Prisoners took over the camp and organized, sending out scouting patrols that eventually met up with Americans on the ground near Nagasaki, through which the camp’s prisoners that could travel then evacuated by ship. Most spent Thanksgiving around Manilla, where many pledged their attendance at yearly reunions to be held in the States.
My father, weighing in at 22kg, was not recognized when he first appeared on his parents’ doorstep.
HF
Oops, that was 44kg, not 22kg.
HF
No, Japan brought it on themselves. the Japanese were the racists, thinking they were smarter and better than the Koreans, the Chinese and the pale faces.
Good point.
I’m half German.
My grandparents made it a point not to speak German during the war and only in private with other Germans after the war.
After what the Germans did during WWII, I’m grateful the world didn’t go Roman on us and solve the German problem once and for all.
The Soviets tried to. A lot of German families did not survive the Soviet occupation. Americans fought hard in Europe because the saw the global threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis. But as many said already on this post. Germany did not attack the US on US soil. There was a good bit of U-boat attacks on American shipping. Even right off our Atlantic coast and we really let that go on for too long trying to stay out of the fray. But most Americans did not feel the way about Germans turned Americans as they did Japanese Americans with close ties to their homeland after Pearl Harbor. As for the A-Bombs, I would have preferred instant death to torture and slow starvation on the Bataan Death march or Japanese POW camps. War is not civilized but we fought with honor against the Japanese who had no honor in this War. Then we helped rebuild Japan and the non Soviet held parts of Germany. I feel that if the treaty following WWI had not been so oppressive, Hitler would have never rose to power.
Anytime someone ridicules the thought of internment camps for politically unfavord groups in America I remind them of this fact.
***produced that depicted the Japanese as subhuman and extremely cruel and depraved.***
One word Nanjing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Life_and_Death
and a book.
HIDDEN HORRORS OF WWII.
http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Horrors-Japanese-Transitions-Asia-America/dp/0813327180
Ever notice how we cross land and sea to root out the last of the Nazi war criminals but seem to ignore the Japanese war criminals today, even when we know where they live.
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