Posted on 08/01/2021 12:40:44 PM PDT by Retain Mike
I figure we owe them another one for Yoko Ono.
The alternative was a land blockade and invasion and going house-to-house and killing everybody along the way until Japan surrendered.
My father was in the US Army during WW2 and involved in two amphibious landings on Japanese held islands. Yes, he landed with Marines, but the Army was still there.
He saw first hand the horror that was island warfare in the Pacific. He felt that he might not have survived a landing on mainland Japan.
From what I have read, the Japanese military did not want the Emperor to surrender. It took dramatic events, such as the invasion by Russia and the Atomic bombs to pull the rug out from under the military opposing surrender.
There was a very interesting book I read about psychological warfare in the Pacific during WW2. https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/you-can‘t-fight-tanks-with-bayonets/
The full title of the book is “You Can't Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare against the Japanese Army in the Southwest Pacific (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)
The Japanese military leadership was consistently lying to the Japanese soldier and mentally conditioning him to die for the emperor. It took really harsh images to cause the typical soldier to say, wait a minute this is not going to work and is stupid. The most successful image used by the US military was of a Japanese solder without ammunition, without explosives charging a USA tank with a bayonet. The outcome of such stupidity was obvious. On many islands that is what the typical Japanese solider who have no supplies was looking at. The atomic bombs provided those not in the Japanese military leadership with a wake-up call that the war was hopeless; that Americans could destroy every city in Japan with one bomb and Japan could do nothing to stop them.
The Atomic bombs were necessary as a way of providing everyone with something unexpected to point to as saying the war was over. The firebombing of Tokyo and other cities was much more of an uncivilized event than the dropping of two atomic bombs.
Continued firebombing, atomic bombing of other cities, starvation by sea blockage prior to a land invasion would have caused so much death and suffering. This says nothing of those who would have died in the land warfare on the Japanese home islands. The people who died in the two atomic bombs were sacrificed to end the war quickly and to save countless lives.
I got into it with quite a few over in the UK before 911 about us using the bombs on Japan back then. I told them to ask ANY of their WW2 pacific vets about that.
Told them that if we had it a bit sooner, there would have been at least three dropped.
OH THE SHOCK!
At least 1.5 million of our men would have died in the invasion of the home Islands of Japan. At the very least that many.
Or LeMay.
Not only that, the Soviets would have gotten in, and taken their half of Japan, if not even more, and left Japan divided, just as Korea and Germany.
Why was the aircraft named “Enola Gay”?
Yeah, we helped China, including helping supply Mao and the Communists to fight the Japs, and what was the thanks we got?
A couple of stories about that German uranium oxide we captured. The Japanese changed their plans for it. Instead of building an atom bomb it was going to be used in a dirty bomb attack on SF to be delivered by planes from their I-400 submarine aircraft carriers on one way missions. The Japanese didn’t know that we captured the German U boat and were still expecting the uranium at the time they surrendered. After being briefed about this possible attack, Truman had another reason to drop the bomb.
It’s said that the uranium was quickly shipped to Oak Ridge, processed, and ended up in the core of the bombs dropped on Japan.
“From what I have read, the Japanese military did not want the Emperor to surrender.”
It was not up to the emperor to surrender. It was up to the advice of those advising him. They couldnt agree, so he ordered them to agree. There was a coup attempt to stop the recording from being played-yes they recorded it because no common person was allowed to hear his voice. They also were never allowed to look at him. He was a God on earth to them.
A real culture shock happened after.
Basically.
per wiki:
“The Enola Gay (/ɪˈnoʊlə/) is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. Lewis during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. The bomb, code-named “Little Boy”, was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the destruction of about three quarters of the city. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in a secondary target, Nagasaki, being bombed instead.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enola_Gay
“Enola Gay” was Col. Paul Tibbets mother’s name.
That is definitely a concern. It’s possible the Soviets would have committed acts of genocide and eliminated the Japanese themselves.
I think it was Tibbets mothers name.
Beat me to it.
Perhaps there’s some kind of drastic typo in your post?
It existed. Other countries such as Germany were working on it by had not developed.
That one Bomb, dropped by one plane could destroy a city. This is a very important point. We could do all the testing in the desert we wanted and no one except the scientists would be sure of the level of damage. But drop the Bomb on a city and that city was gone, well that's proof everyone can understand.
Others may not like the result, but fear is the great motivator!
Remember that Missouri's the "Show-Me" state.....
I knew all that. Thanks.
But what does “Enola” mean?
But what does “Enola” mean?
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