Posted on 08/03/2005 1:18:32 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (Aug. 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9) didn't end World War II -- at least not quite. The six days between Nagasaki and Japan's surrender on Aug. 15 were six more hideous days of war for U.S. and allied forces. Combat -- and Japanese atrocities -- continued in China, the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
They were also six days of vicious political intrigue and turmoil in Tokyo, as the so-called "peace" and "war" factions in Japan's high command struggled for control of the state.
In his classic essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," Paul Fussell (World War II vet and National Book Award-winner) observes, "Allied (Pacific) casualties were running to over 7,000 per week." After Nagasaki, "captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the U.S. submarine Bonefish was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down ... and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost."
Fussell scorns Harvard prof and insistent anti-nuclear-nit John Kenneth Galbraith's twaddle that the A-bombs accelerated Japan's surrender by (quoth Galbraith) "at most, two or three weeks."
Galbraith's estimate of Japan's resiliency is a typical figment of ivory tower fevers -- military calculations at the time suggested Japan would fight for another year. But even accepting Galbraith's breezy guess, three more weeks of war with Japan meant another 21,000 Allied killed and wounded. Fussell, a combat vet wounded while fighting the Nazis in Europe, was re-assigned to a division slated to assault the Japanese island of Honshu. Galbraith, Fussell says, "worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don't demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn't."
Apparently, the moral facility to condemn the bomb is directly related to one's distance, in space and time, from actual combat.
Declaring that "Hiroshima was a war crime" has become an anti-American academic racket. One clique maintains Truman A-bombed "yellows" in order to impress Stalin. Truman was a calculating "racist-fascist." Such "opinions" deserve special damnation. They libel a genuine democratic populist and the president who desegregated the American armed forces.
Another clique absorbs itself in a debate over how "few" additional casualties the Allies would have borne had they invaded Japan sans A-bomb.
Many veterans find this argument morally repugnant. Assume, as the academic revisionists callously do, that there is some "X" number of additional GI and Japanese military and civilian deaths from "non-atom" warfare which is a "more morally acceptable loss" than 220,000 Japanese civilian and military killed by atom bombs. Who, 60 years on, can name that figure?
The critics' make much of a vague June 1945 estimate that the Kyushu assault would cost "only" 31,000 Allied casualties. This "best case" assumed the Japanese had 350,000 troops on Kyushu. In July 1945, the Imperial Army deployed 560,000 troops on the island. At least 5,000 kamikazes were available.
Okinawa, where 101,000 Japanese and 24,000 Americans died, confirmed in the minds of responsible Allied leaders the "worst case." Fanatic Japanese resistance was a battlefield fact. Truman speculated that atomic weapons may have saved the Allies another 500,000 dead and the Japanese at least twice that many.
A case can be made that nuclear weapons, since they represent a quantum boost in devastation, are different from "conventional" weapons. "Disproportionate destruction" suggests nukes are beyond the moral pale of Just War. This is a proposition worth debating, relevant during the Cold War, even more relevant in an era when religious terrorists seek weapons of mass destruction.
Truman's context, however, was World War II. Truman, like fellow veterans Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, knew that for the front-line soldier, "better them than us" is life and death immediacy, not a matter of academic rumination -- and Truman valued American lives over an enemy's.
The shock effect of the atom super-weapon on all but the most hardened of Japan's high command allowed Tokyo's "peace" faction to finesse the militarist, suicidal zealots and surrender. To heck with conjecture. This Japanese decision, goaded by The Bomb, put an end to the mutual slaughter.
> Indiscriminate genocide is a crime against humanity.
Which, of course, the nuking of two cities was *not.* Had the US made an effort to make the Japanese extinct, *that* would be genocide. But the a-bombs were no more genocide than the Jap firebombing of Shanghai was genocide.
> The A bomb is not something to thank God for.
Correct. Thanks here go to Einstein and Oppenheimer and Groves.
I can think of a couple of other places that could use a good nuking right now...
Even if it only ends the Jihad a few weeks early,
it's all right with me.
Everything you say may be true, but it still wasn't a blessing for the thousands and thousands who suffered horribly from the bomb, and I can imagine being pretty steamed by your statement that it was "a blessing for all" if I were a mother who had seen her children incinerated on that day. Can't we live with two conflicting thoughts in our head -- it was something that had to be done, AND it was anything but a blessing?
What places should we bomb? That's the problem. We could bomb Riyadh or Teheran and some maniac in Birmingham or Los Angeles would still be going around with dynamite in his backpack. Oh for the good old days of the nation state....
There was nothing indiscriminate about the dropping of those bombs, they were intended to hit major Japanese infastructure and they hit their mark. With the unthinkable atrocities that befell our servicemen that fell into the hands of these people, not to mention the generations of Chinese wiped out by them, I can't say I have any problem whatsoever with how the end of the war played out. They threw down the gauntlet, not us. We finished the job, as well we should have, and saved countless lives in it's wake.
>>Which, of course, the nuking of two cities was *not.*
Sure was. A genocide need not wipe out an entire race of people. It can wipe out an entire class, such as those residing in a particular area...
>>But the a-bombs were no more genocide than the Jap firebombing of Shanghai was genocide.
As I stated, America was not alone...
>>With the unthinkable atrocities that befell our servicemen that fell into the hands of these people, not to mention the generations of Chinese wiped out by them, I can't say I have any problem whatsoever with how the end of the war played out.
That's simply becuase you have a flawed sense of justice...
Please, elaborate. This should be good.
It was a blessing for Americans. It sucked for the Japanese. Here's my conflicting thoughts.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1456189/posts
There were alternatives, including laying siege to Japan via Naval blockade, but I guess the idea was to get it over with..
It's not quite that easy. The war in the Pacific was more than just a matter of invading Japan.
When the big bombs hit Japan, my father was on a train in France, heading to a port to take him to the CBI. That fighting would have continued, blockade or no blockade. Those bombs probably saved him, and countless other Americans and Asians. Thank God for the A bomb.
If we had 100 A bombs available, and used all of them to avoid an invasion, it would still be a good trade.
No. Thank Oppenheimer.
I think 1st is suggesting we were too easy on them.
The United States lost 300000 soldiers in Europ, North Africa and Pacific from Dec 1941 to September 1945
>>Please, elaborate. This should be good.
You elaborated for me with your response... You may feel that what you said is ok, but consider this. Those with mental problems quite often can't see their own illness. (Not that you are mental, but the point is that I'm sure you see nothing wrong with your post...)
>>Those bombs probably saved him, and countless other Americans and Asians. .
Probably? How can you be so sure?
>>Thank God for the A bomb
The Abomb is an affront to the Natural Law, and hence, an affront to God.
>>If we had 100 A bombs available, and used all of them to avoid an invasion, it would still be a good trade.
Depends where you lived at the time, doesn't it???? ;-)
hahaha...
Do you have any knowledge at all of the war in the Pacific or are you just naturally overly emotional?
Do you have any knowledge at all of the war in the Pacific or are you just naturally overly emotional?
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