Was it immoral to drop atomic bombs on Japan?

“...My point is with the revisionists who engage in various contortions to try to make the case that the bombing campaign against Japan was one where the US simply had no other choice than to target population centers, or that the destruction caused to the population centers was actually unintended. It was clear that before the Americans even entered the war that we considered the Japanese civilians a fair target, and that we were simply going ignore the principles of just war...” [Captain Walker, post 140]

It’s always fascinating when a forum member engages in moral equivalizing.

But in so doing, you have willfully ignored a basic principle: win the war first, then worry about morality. Try it any other way, and you flirt with disaster.

Not a contortion, not revisionism, just a simple observation concerning outcomes.

But in so doing, you have willfully ignored a basic principle: win the war first, then worry about morality.

I'm actually going to leave this comment as it is and not reply to it. I have sufficient confidence that those reading this thread who support the use of the atomic bombs will point out its absurdity in short order.

Concur

Revisionists would have to change the Japanese Warlord Tojo and his commitment to war at all costs to retain Japanese honor. Which wasn’t going to happen.

After the two atomic devices were dropped the emperor who was a god to the Japanese stepped in and ended it.

As for the Lemay incendiary bombing campaign, yes Lemay was waging a bombing campaign prior to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. History tells us that the AAF had enough incendiary bombs ready to completely level every major city and production facility, most of which were located within cities, in order to shorten Japanese sustainability followed up by a landing. The Landing and invasion would have met with very stiff resistance by all Japanese whether they were carrying sharpened bamboo sticks or were able to cobble together a defensive Army. But they were done.

Japanese resolve was to Die With Honor every man, woman, and child.

Lemay’s intensive incendiary bomb campaign would have eventually killed far more Japanese in the two Atomic devices and saved civilian lives as they would have been committed to defending the homeland to the death.

As to fourth device, we did not have enough atomic material ready and at that point in atomic history it took a long time to produce enough material to make the three devices that we had, one of which was tested at White Sands.

Was it immoral for the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor? Was it immoral for them to invade Korea, China,, and the South Pacific Islands. When faced with uncontrollable aggression you do what you have to do.
So again, leftist media asking the wrong questions.

The baby boomers exist thanks to the Atom Bomb and the will to deploy it. My late father told me the Third Army (in Germany by then) was about to be deployed to Japan. He knew at the time that it would mean a slaughter on both sides. Everyone knew. His life was spared, thus mine came to be. Only today when Patton’s soldiers have all died could history begin to be rewritten. Once in awhile, I’ve wondered about the virus killing off those old men...

“...I have sufficient confidence that those reading this thread who support the use of the atomic bombs will point out its absurdity in short order.” [Captain Walker, post 142]

A characteristic response from a moralizer. Unsurprisingly so: you claim authority, but you do nothing to earn it. That’s arrogant enough all by itself, but you go on to declare this authority is absolute and may never be questioned by us lesser mortals. Cheap and easy: a lazy man’s route to power.

My authority isn't my own; it rests on the authority of two millennia of Christianity.

In ttwo thousand years of Christianity there had never been a teaching that gave any support at all to the idea that the end of a war justified the means to it; the very idea would remove any concept of a war crime for the simple reason that your way of thinking could always be invoked in the defense of the accused.

The Rape of Nanking? "We just wanted to end this."

The Blitz? "We were trying to end the war."

My Lai? "We wanted to end the war. And if the generals who pushed for the incineration of civilians could use this in their defense, we will certainly use it in Lt. Calley's'."

Go back through the Geneva Conventions, go back to Aquinas, and go back to Augustine. (Go as far back as you need to.). Find any teaching that gave anyone approval to commit murder if they did so with the intent of ending the fighting.

“My authority isn’t my own; it rests on the authority of two millennia of Christianity...(Go as far back as you need to.). Find any teaching that gave anyone approval to commit murder if they did so with the intent of ending the fighting.” [Captain Walker, post 147]

If the authority isn’t your own, it’s more a little curious, as it always manages to assist you in coming out of the game on top. And - marvel of marvels - it’s never around to be questioned.

It’s them or us.

If we meekly obey that lengthy list of dogmatists you’ve cited, there is only one possible result: we lose. If that outcome satisfies your moral sensibilities, I’d say you are more of a hindrance than a help.

If the authority isn’t your own, it’s more a little curious, as it always manages to assist you in coming out of the game on top.

I don't know about "always"; this is the one subject where I have referred to Christian teaching to demonstrate that the United States, on a moral plane, fell short.

Targeting innocents isn't wrong because I've said it was wrong; I'm simply pointing to Christian teaching to demonstrate that it was wrong. It was just as wrong for Germans to bomb soft targets (Coventry, London, and Rotterdam to name the obvious ones), it was also wrong for the British to bomb soft targets (Hamburg and Dresden being the obvious ones), and it was wrong for the Americans as well (Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to name the obvious ones).

We can't be cute about this and maintain the fiction that the rules are different for the Americans, because well, we're the Americans. The moral law that made it a crime to target British innocents made it a crime to target the German and Japanese innocents as well.

I've demonstrated throughout this thread that there never was a moral dilemma in the summer of 1945 about whether or not the United States should wipe out civilian population centers; the campaign to target population centers had been made before the United States entered the war some four years prior. Every discussion on the subject has been one of moral theatrics; nobody wants to believe that our hands were dirty, so the debate conjures up a false scenario where our conduct was as pure as the fresh-fallen snow prior to then, and that the decision to bomb two cities was (if you really look closely and hold it up to the light in certain way) the most moral decision we could make.

I've only pointed out that it's all drivel; we were going to burn Japan to the ground to win the war, and we knew it before we fired the first shot.

“...this is the one subject where I have referred to Christian teaching to demonstrate that the United States, on a moral plane, fell short. Targeting innocents isn’t wrong because I’ve said it was wrong...we were going to burn Japan to the ground to win the war, and we knew it before we fired the first shot.” [Captain Walker, post 149]

You labor under the misconception that belief trumps reality. Assures you a rhetorical win, at no cost, while you cling to a hypothesis that cannot be falsified.

Do you also labor under the misconception that the Allies won the Second World War by dint of superior morality?

Your final sentence is both factually and historically wrong.

Senior USAAF personnel worked long and hard to prove their thesis that air bombardment of enemy “civilian” workers and industrial facilities would affect a conflict’s outcome. They made come true in many instances, but with the limits on surveillance and other intelligence sources, this wasn’t apparent at the time. Not until the 1980s did it become known that Nazi industrial production of some commodities and components was so profoundly affected that reserve stocking levels dwindled to a few days. Morale among the industrial labor force stood on the brink more than once.

The strategic air campaign against Japan ran into different problems. Certain weather factors were found to exceed limits of adjustment in sighting systems: production had been disaggregated to such levels that individual residences were equipped with machine tools.

These target characteristics greatly compounded difficulties in obtaining results. Large-scale raids using incendiary munitions was a response. But incendiaries were not chosen beforehand.

Messy? Yes. Brutal? Yes. If that troubles you, it can only mean that you prefer the deaths of Allied troops to the deaths of Imperial Japanese troops and Japanese civilians.

I cannot accept such a tradeoff as a moral outcome. Why do you?

These target characteristics greatly compounded difficulties in obtaining results. Large-scale raids using incendiary munitions was a response. But incendiaries were not chosen beforehand.

I hate to break it to you, my friend, because I feel like I'm telling some kid that there's no Santa Claus, but this statement is simply not true.

Look up "JB-355"; spend a few minutes reading about it.

As I said before, Chennault, as head of the Flying Tigers, was pushing Roosevelt for B-17s to be used to drop incendiaries on Japanese cities as early as the summer of 1941. ("JB-355" was the resolution FDR signed in July of 1941 that gave the green light to Chennault's request; it's the reason that the B-17s were in the Philippines on 8 December 1941, and it's the reason the Japanese destroyed them.)

Chennault: "A small number of long-range bombers carrying incendiary bombs could quickly reduce Japan's paper-and-matchwood cities to heaps of smoking ashes."

General George C. Marshall, before the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor: "If war with the Japanese does come, we’ll fight mercilessly," General George C. Marshall told news reporters in an off-the-record briefing on November 15, 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. "Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out."

Again, Dolittle's men dropped incendiaries on Tokyo in early 1942.

I've provided sources for this information; LeMay himself acknowledged that he would have been tried for war crimes in the event the Japanese were to win the war.

The following article (which I linked to in a previous post) describes "Operation Meetinghouse"; this was the raid on Tokyo in March of 1945:

www.airspacemag.com

In this article is a map of the city of Tokyo that was prepared by the U.S. Army Engineers; the map identifies sections of the city by their level of inflammability. (It didn't identify military targets; it identified the different areas of the capital by how well they would burn.)

The map was prepared in 1942, 2-3 years before the bombing campaign began.

On a side note, none of this troubles me; I wasn't around when any of this was going on and I'm young enough so that my understanding of the war didn't come from a father (or uncle) who had served in it. Because of this, I have no more of an emotional attachment to this conflict than I do to the War of 1812. (And because of this, I have no problem looking at this objectively.)

The short answer is NO.

“...Dolittle’s men dropped incendiaries on Tokyo in early 1942...

“... LeMay himself acknowledged that he would have been tried for war crimes in the event the Japanese were to win the war...

“...none of this troubles me;...(...I have no problem looking at this objectively.) [Captain Walker, post 151]

Goodness gracious, you’re right!

The B-25Bs that launched from USS Hornet on 18 April 1942 did carry incendiary munitions: one weapon each, out of four total (the other three were general-purpose weapons of the 500 pound class, with a filler of high explosive). If you are able spin these details into a central, immovable policy directive telling Allied bomber forces what to do and how to do it for the remaining three years and four months of the war against Imperial Japan, I honor your rhetorical gifts.

It’s a mistake to quote senior leaders such as James H Doolittle and Curtis E LeMay, then pretend their off-the-cuff opinions and stray remarks defined policy for conducting every later operation in exhaustive detail. All these guys talked and wrote a very great deal and not every word carried equal force, nor significance.

Claire L Chennault should be afforded less weight in discussions like we’re having. Before the war he was a washed-up Air Corps Captain who had fallen out of favor with leadership for advocating pursuit aviation over long-range bombardment. He wasn’t taken seriously until he managed to accumulate some successes with his American Volunteer Group.

If you find pre-war assertions about torching Japan’s Home Islands ominous in light of later air strikes, permit me to point out that all of it barely rated the dismissive moniker “tough talk,” until the United States actually made good on promises to ramp up production of systems, weaponry, munitions, and supplies. Dark days were upon the country, even as most Americans wallowed in wishful thinking and denial.

Moral absolutists who fret over this or that action by the USA and UK during the Second World War are lending the topic a seriousness it doesn’t deserve: “war crimes” were a ploy, a gambit invented by the Soviets to con the rest of the UN into taking them seriously. They were not trying enlighten you, they were trying to fool you. The trick worked.

If you’ve been hoping I will genuflect to your righteousness, I have to disappoint you. Your authority isn’t earned by any honest effort in the real world. But you issue diktats to the rest of us as if you were a potentate; when challenged, you hide behind the skirts of an “Authority” that only supports what you say and works your will: an intellectually dishonest way to sneak in through the back door and exercise power without legitimacy. A gambit all too human.

Congratulating yourself on your “objectivity” in this is a non-starter: makes your credibility smaller, not greater. In a word, untrustworthy. You’ve been enjoying a life of lotus-eating ease courtesy of people who actually went to war in the 1930s and 1940s, enduring sacrifices untold for our sakes.

Moral absolutists who fret over this or that action by the USA and UK during the Second World War are lending the topic a seriousness it doesn’t deserve: "war crimes" were a ploy, a gambit invented by the Soviets to con the rest of the UN into taking them seriously. They were not trying enlighten you, they were trying to fool you. The trick worked.

I'm not sure what you are saying here.

If your point is that there is simply no such thing as a war crime (and that the trials of German and Japanese "war criminals" were nothing more than arbitrary demonstrations of vengeance against defeated foes), then we don't have a conversation.

If your point is that the only war criminals during the Second World War spoke only German or Japanese, then we don't have anything to talk about here either.

If your point is that the planned and protracted bombing campaign against Japanese cities was not a war crime based on insufficient evidence of intent on the part of the American military or because the violence administered by the Americans was not disproportionate, then I suppose we may have a discussion, although your position is increasingly untenable; there is simply no evidence in support of it.

The B-25Bs that launched from USS Hornet on 18 April 1942 did carry incendiary munitions: one weapon each, out of four total (the other three were general-purpose weapons of the 500 pound class, with a filler of high explosive). If you are able spin these details into a central, immovable policy directive telling Allied bomber forces what to do and how to do it for the remaining three years and four months of the war against Imperial Japan, I honor your rhetorical gifts.

A raid of sixteen B-25s dropping anything hardly constitutes military policy. I've only pointed out that the incendiaries were being used from the start (and not in response to unforeseen circumstances or events).

The "central, immovable policy directive" you describe was simply the run-up to the actual bombing raids. Forget about the comments anyone was making at the time; let's look at their actions.

I've already referred to the map of Tokyo that identified the neighborhoods by their inflammability.

In 1943, almost two years before the B-29 raids were launched from the Marianas, the USAAF constructed a German and Japanese village in the Utah Proving Ground for the purpose of testing incendiary bombs on (wait for it) houses. The US military was trying to determine the best way to...burn down peoples' homes. (What could possibly be the point of constructing a village in the desert for the purpose of bombing it with incendiaries if we didn't intend to bomb a village with incendiaries?)

www.japanairraids.org

It’s a mistake to quote senior leaders such as James H Doolittle and Curtis E LeMay, then pretend their off-the-cuff opinions and stray remarks defined policy for conducting every later operation in exhaustive detail. All these guys talked and wrote a very great deal and not every word carried equal force, nor significance.

I haven't quoted Dolittle. (For the sake of this discussion I'll concede that LeMay's comment about acknowledging his presence at a potential Japanese war crimes trial was an off-the-cuff remark.) If, instead of Dolittle, you were referring to General Marshall, then I would respectfully disagree that his was an off-the-cuff remark. He was speaking at a press conference, and he was providing specific details. He would have known about "JB-355" as well as the B-17s and their aircrews being deployed in Southeast Asia for the purpose of incendiary bombing (cities); these facts fit in perfectly with his comments.

Claire L Chennault should be afforded less weight in discussions like we’re having. Before the war he was a washed-up Air Corps Captain who had fallen out of favor with leadership for advocating pursuit aviation over long-range bombardment. He wasn’t taken seriously until he managed to accumulate some successes with his American Volunteer Group.

While I suppose an attack on an individual's character is reflexive for someone short of ammunition in a debate, the statement about any past shortcomings of his has nothing to do with his position at the time. More importantly, his position at the time was sufficient to have the ear of President Roosevelt. Most importantly, his position at the time was such that his request had not only been heard by the President, it had been granted by him as well.

If you find pre-war assertions about torching Japan’s Home Islands ominous in light of later air strikes...

I don't find anything about it ominous. I've only responded to the revisionist, who takes the position that the targeting of Japanese population centers was either unintended or forced by events that could not have been foreseen during the planning stages of the Army Air Force's bombing campaign against Japan. My point has been consistent throughout this thread; the Japanese population centers were always considered legitimate targets of the bombing campaign and that any discussion about the morality of dropping the atomic bombs is nothing more than a distraction.

If you’ve been hoping I will genuflect to your righteousness, I have to disappoint you. Your authority isn’t earned by any honest effort in the real world. But you issue diktats to the rest of us as if you were a potentate; when challenged, you hide behind the skirts of an “Authority” that only supports what you say and works your will: an intellectually dishonest way to sneak in through the back door and exercise power without legitimacy. A gambit all too human.

Congratulating yourself on your “objectivity” in this is a non-starter: makes your credibility smaller, not greater. In a word, untrustworthy. You’ve been enjoying a life of lotus-eating ease courtesy of people who actually went to war in the 1930s and 1940s, enduring sacrifices untold for our sakes.

Either concede my point or else present evidence to support a counterpoint. If you can't do either, then just walk away. All you have left is the ad hominem attack, which is unbecoming in a forum that promotes the free exchange of ideas. (It's also a pretty good indicator that the discussion is over.)

“...If your point is that there is simply no such thing as a war crime...then we don’t have a conversation...

“...If, instead of Dolittle, you were referring to General Marshall, then I would respectfully disagree that his was an off-the-cuff remark. He was speaking at a press conference, and he was providing specific details...

“...While I suppose an attack on an individual’s character is reflexive...the statement about any past shortcomings of his has nothing to do with his position at the time...his position at the time was such that his request had not only been heard by the President, it had been granted by him as well...

“...Either concede my point or else present evidence to support a counterpoint. If you can’t do either, then just walk away. All you have left is the ad hominem attack,..” [Captain Walker, post 154]

Can’t help but notice how dogged you have been. Somewhat in opposition to your ignorance of the mindset of certain military personnel, the functioning of corporate culture in various portions of the military establishment, and your tin ear when it comes to perceiving how the larger civil culture was affected by World War 2 and various world events during the first half of the 20th century.

Moralizers never tire of telling us that their pet preoccupations are objectively real - that they exist outside the minds of people, independent of the society that brought them forth, the culture that acknowledges them and uses them (or violates them).

I’ve never found this to be true. Without people, morals aren’t present. The plants, animals, plankton, fungi, bacteria, viruses don’t know nor do they care. Therefore if the people vanish - as they might after a wartime defeat, say - all talk of morality stops. Together with talk of every other sort.

I’m not privy to the inner consciousness of moralizers, so I’m not perfectly sure why they are so feverish to convince us their schemes are the only game in town and we have no choice but to comply with their orders. Perhaps because they fear we won’t take them seriously if they jawbone us in terms less dire?

All of which is idle speculation. To be honest, I don’t much care if your dogma is true or false. What bothers me, and concerns me more closely, is that people like you have made my job more difficult.

I spent somewhat longer than 28-1/2 years in uniform. Thirteen years of that was devoted to performing operational tests: for those unfamiliar with the term, what it amounts to is performing tests on weapons (and systems, and every other piece of gear the military acquires). My office, and a small handful of other organizations across DoD and related agencies, collected the data that was used by senior leaders, politicians, and other parties to give a thumbs up or down on systems big and small.

So I had to develop a broad knowledge - not only of the systems, but of the psychology inside many military organizations, politics (in and out of the military establishment), physics, and any number of subsections of doctrine. Less pleasantly, insight into the psychology of power players with large egoes was a definite plus when it came to career survival - dealing with generals, navigating deftly around their quirks, was a feature of daily life.

Military establishments do not succeed because the wider society gifts them with a “better” moral code (whatever that is). They succeed because they are better-organized, enjoy lavish allocation of resources, members know trust each other more fully, they work harder to understand their adversaries and to craft their own response. Then they practice a whole lot.

They don’t always get their way, to be sure. Especially when it comes to resources and political game-playing.

In this context, press conferences conducted by George C Marshall, demands for B-17 groups, by Claire Chenault, maps of the relative combustibility of neighborhoods in Tokyo, and alteration of standing orders by Jimmy Doolittle lose some measure of seriousness. Those unfamiliar with the planning process are quite out of their depth when contemplating the existence (or absence) of plans involving specific actions directed against specific entities. In many ways it’s not much more significant than getting everybody’s name into the phone book.

Claire L Chennault really was a washed-up O-3 before heading to China. He had clashed far too often with Air Corps current wisdom and was very undiplomatic about it. He’s remembered by pop-culture enthusiasts as some species of genius who was ignored too often by the power structure - recalls the adage about prophets being without honor in their own country. He was lionized in light of early successes, but once 14th Air Force was created their activities did not differ all that much from other numbered Air Forces, within the limits imposed by what they were allocated, and the adversary they faced.

The illustrations you posted tickled my fancy. Hadn’t seen these specific pictures before, but the construction of mock villages or entire city blocks was not in any way remarkable. It’s been done often, to test effectiveness of a particular weapon against contemplated target complexes.

This is a bit vague and long-winded; unfortunately, I think we're talking past each other.

Western civilization owes its existence to the idea that there is an objective Truth that surpasses our existence; if we reject that concept and approach life and death matters emotionally (and not with the rational mind that a firm belief in this Truth provides), we will find that we can justify pretty much anything, including the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocents who happened to be at home when we dropped incendiary bombs on their neighborhood.

And because we would think about these subjects emotionally, we would lack the consistency even in our thoughts to acknowledge that we would be declaring as war criminals any enemy officers and aircrews who had done the same.

“...I think we’re talking past each other.

“Western civilization owes its existence to the idea that there is an objective Truth that surpasses our existence; if we reject that concept...we will find that we can justify pretty much anything...

“And because we would think about these subjects emotionally, we would lack the consistency even in our thoughts to acknowledge that we would be declaring as war criminals any enemy officers and aircrews who had done the same.” [Captain Walker, post 156]

Very astute. You picked up on aspects of the disagreement I wasn’t able to.

But I suspect your “Truth” is a matter of belief. If it wasn’t, you’d not have used a capital T.

The fact that you and a bundle of others believe it (whatever it is), and the fact that it’s been around long enough to have survived getting handed down from one generation to the next, conveys nothing about its validity in the real world. People have believed all sorts of things in the past and quite likely will continue doing so far into the future.

I can’t say if such belief is valid or not and don’t much care. Neither do I concern myself with tracing the belief back to its origins in history, nor deducing how much it has contributed to the success of Western Civ in the modern world.

When it comes to personal motivations and rationalizations, it has always been sufficient on my part to realize that Western Civ is ours, and it’s been under attack. Anything more elevated would be presumptuous.

I will assert that Western Civ was in peril during the period 1931-1945. If that did not satisfy your criteria for justifying armed response, what would?

If your goal is to convince us it’s wrong to attack enemy civilians, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are poor examples. Both nations led the way in conning and coercing every last citizen into serving the state. And because both nations were engaged in war against the Allies, that transformed every last citizen of theirs into a legitimate target.

The fact that you and a bundle of others believe it (whatever it is), and the fact that it’s been around long enough to have survived getting handed down from one generation to the next, conveys nothing about its validity in the real world. People have believed all sorts of things in the past and quite likely will continue doing so far into the future.

I can’t say if such belief is valid or not and don’t much care.

But even as you deride the moral argument, you insist that the United States was on the "correct" side of it.

You stated earlier that it was not the original intent of the United States to target Japanese cities with incendiary bombs. I have already demonstrated that this is simply false; our statements, our planning, and our military campaign against the country is a matter of public record.

The usual defenders of the bombing campaign against Japan are unapologetic: We would be in the war only to win it, and win it we must; there was simply no place for the usual pleasantries such as concern over babies and their Binkies, schoolchildren, first responders, hospital staff, or even hospitals. (Read some of the research on the subject; whatever their personal conduct may be in their day-to-day lives, the defenders of the campaign are completely amoral in regard to the subject of targeting Japanese cities with incendiaries. The morality of the act is never brought up in the discussion.)

I suspect you're a "moralizer" yourself, even as you may still be in the closet.

The unquestioning defender of the bombing campaign shrugs off the moral arguments with nary a thought; it's the weak "moralizer" who recognizes the line between a moral right and a moral wrong but who engages in all sorts of theatrics to tell himself that despite the evidence, his country would never have committed an act so heinous; there simply had to be a justification for it.

(In other words, if the moral dimension of a matter is based on nothing more than a set of superstitions dragged through the millennia, then why is it important to you whether our actions were "morally right" or "morally wrong"?)

“...you insist that the United States was on the “correct” side of it.

“You stated earlier that it was not the original intent of the United States to target Japanese cities with incendiary bombs. I have already demonstrated that this is simply false; our statements, our planning, and our military campaign against the country is a matter of public record...

“...I suspect you’re a “moralizer” yourself, even as you may still be in the closet.

“The unquestioning defender of the bombing campaign shrugs off the moral arguments...

...why is it important to you whether our actions were “morally right” or “morally wrong”?” [Captain Walker, post 158]

I still shrink from claiming any sort of status as a moralizer. My ego isn’t so huge that I can talk myself into the delusion that I can set standards of behavior for humanity at large, outside a narrow range of professional expertise and legal authority conveyed by my commission (which hasn’t been active for a couple decades).

By way of contrast, your tone and word choice hint that you somehow came to believe you have been handed an unlimited right to set moral standards for all people on the globe, in all times and every circumstance, as if you owned a secret hotline or decoder ring that distinguishes Right from Wrong for you and must never be questioned. The fact that you’ve no factual knowledge nor experience in the subjects you presume to pass judgment on seems of no moment to you.

The mildest response I can make is that you are in error about my opinions on the Allied victories of 1945. I will offer the summary judgment that the world is better off today that events turned out as they did. Americans were darned lucky. Which in turn tells us nothing about what was “right” or “wrong” concerning decisions made at the time or the actions taken to implement them.

It seems urgent to you that the rest of the forum be impressed by your rectitude. I can’t say that it means anything. I resolved to take the career path I did while the anti-war protests concerning Vietnam were at their height; the words “We are complying with a higher morality” could be heard from a lot of lips then. In the 49 years that have come and gone since I signed on the dotted line, a multitude of other people have uttered that same sentence, defending or attacking every cause that can be imagined, on all sides of every issue.

I wasn’t impressed with the sentence back then. After unending repetitions, year after year after year, it impresses me less than ever.

By way of contrast, your tone and word choice hint that you somehow came to believe you have been handed an unlimited right to set moral standards for all people on the globe, in all times and every circumstance, as if you owned a secret hotline or decoder ring that distinguishes Right from Wrong for you and must never be questioned. The fact that you’ve no factual knowledge nor experience in the subjects you presume to pass judgment on seems of no moment to you.

The mildest response I can make is that you are in error about my opinions on the Allied victories of 1945. I will offer the summary judgment that the world is better off today that events turned out as they did. Americans were darned lucky. Which in turn tells us nothing about what was “right” or “wrong” concerning decisions made at the time or the actions taken to implement them.

If "right" and "wrong" should ever be left up to either whim or the winning side of an armed conflict, you certainly don't need me to tell you how disastrous that would be.

From what you've revealed, you've grown up during the halcyon days of the American heyday. In terms of serious reflection on the country you've grown up in or in whose military you've served, it's not clear if this is good or bad; some emotional distance from a subject is usually required for critical thought.

I will bid adieu here and thank you for your time on this thread (as well as for your military service). If I may, I would only point out that almost nothing is what it first appears to be.

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