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.
>>Do you have any knowledge at all of the war in the Pacific or are you just naturally overly emotional?
Do you have knowledge of the natural law, or are you just another animal who lives by their senses?
And, though I am not emotional about this, there would be nothing wrong in being so about this issue. I prefer, however, to take the intellectual approach...
Do you have any knowledge at all of the war in the Pacific or are you just naturally overly emotional?
Not even close.
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...
Ah. So "genocide" gets another definition. This also applies to the genocide at the World Trade Center, the genocide at the Pentagon, the genocide in Waco, the genocide in Oklahoma City.
OK. Now that "genocide" has been defined to be nothing more than killing more than one person in a single location, what are we goign to call efforts to wipe out distinct ethnic, cultural or religious groups?
What I am is someone who is aware of what went on in this war. You want me to cry about civilians dying? Yeah, I think I'll pass. These were the same ones that would have cut your head off and eaten you just because, sweetheart. Just breaks my heart, the whole thing. Boo hoo.
I feel the same way. Thin the herd.I would go out for a pizza the same night!
Well, now that we know you have mastered the art of having your keyboard pretend to laugh, do you have something to add to the discussion?
When the Atom Bomb Fell
Oh, it went up so loud, it divided up the clouds,
And the houses did vanish away.
And a great ball of light filled the Japanese with fright
They must have thought it was their judgment day.
Smoke and fire, it did flow, through the land of Tokyo.
There was brimstone and dust everywhere.
When it all cleared away, there the cruel Japs did lay.
The answer to our fighting boys' prayers, yes, Lord,
The answer to our fighting boys' prayers.
There was no atheist in a foxhole,
And men who never prayed before
Lifted tired and bloodshot eyes to heaven
And begged the Lord to end that awful war.
They told him of their homes and loved ones.
They told him that they'd like to be there.
I believe the bomb that struck Hiroshima
was the answer to our fighting boys' prayers.
Oh, it went up so loud, it divided up the clouds,
And the houses did vanish away.
And a great ball of light filled the Japanese with fright
They must have thought it was their judgment day.
Smoke and fire, it did flow, through the land of Tokyo.
There was brimstone and dust everywhere.
When it all cleared away, there the cruel Japs did lay.
The answer to our fighting boys' prayers, yes, Lord,
The answer to our fighting boys' prayers.
Karl & Harty, Columbia Records, 1945
>>Ah. So "genocide" gets another definition. This also applies to the genocide at the World Trade Center, the genocide at the Pentagon, the genocide in Waco, the genocide in Oklahoma City.
Think of it as getting granular. This was a regional genocide -- it wasn't other races that were targeted. It was the Japanese, in a specific region, that was targeted.
>>OK. Now that "genocide" has been defined to be nothing more than killing more than one person in a single location, what are we goign to call efforts to wipe out distinct ethnic, cultural or religious groups?
See above.
>>These were the same ones that would have cut your head off and eaten you just because, sweetheart. Just breaks my heart, the whole thing. Boo hoo
And all blacks eat watermelons, hispanics wash dishes, and white people can't dance... Rigt? I mean, according to your logic, stereotypes are true -- all those japanese civilians were samurai's who chop heads off. Hmm, I guess those Catholic missionaries did that also...
So...we were committing genocide by laying seige to Atlanta during the Civil War?
You are aware that there were no such things as true Samurai's by WWII, right?
You didn't read the FR thread that I gave you the link for in post#31, did you? Of course not. Why let facts get in the way of the annual Hiroshima whine?
The Abomb is an affront to the Natural Law, and hence, an affront to God.
The A bomb is physics, plain and simple. Where is the affront to "Natural Law"?
Depends where you lived at the time, doesn't it????
I wasn't alive then, but if the bombs hadn't been dropped, I might not be here.
Who was the Admiral, on seeing the destruction at Pearl Harbor, that said "When it's over, Japanese will only be spoken in Hell"?
While it is still possible, talk to a survivor of the Bataan Death March. Find out what they think of the A bomb, and the end of the war.
When any society chooses to harm a vastly stronger society they will be made to pay dearly. The choice Japan had was to have a few hundred thousand die or a few million die. By demonstrating that we had the power to make a few million die by killing a few hundred thousand, we forced the most humanitarian solution upon them.
After Pearl Harbor, Japan never had a choice of not seeing tremendous harm to its people. Ending that violence in the soonest way was the greatest general blessing for the most people. The blessing to all was the gift of life given to the many more survivors, no badly how scarred they were.
That's not the point -- I was being sarcastic..
>>You didn't read the FR thread that I gave you the link for in post#31, did you? Of course not. Why let facts get in the way of the annual Hiroshima whine?
Yes I did read, and I have read other information on this.. Just because something is written doesn't mean it's factual.. Remember, those against the war in Iraq are claiming over 100,000 civilians have been killed. Think thier numbers are accurate?
>>The A bomb is physics, plain and simple. Where is the affront to "Natural Law"?
Ahh..Maybe you should go study it, and learn about the natural law. But I warn you, your thoughts on the A bomb may change as a result...
>>I wasn't alive then, but if the bombs hadn't been dropped, I might not be here.
And some young baby who died in Hiroshima definitely isn't here to participate in this debate... I wonder what their thoughs would have been, possibly "can I live???
>>While it is still possible, talk to a survivor of the Bataan Death March. Find out what they think of the A bomb, and the end of the war.
Atrocities do not justify atrocities....
Stop following the fallible ideology of man, the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh, or whoever you happen to agree with on this issue. Go study the natural law and you'll be enlightened as to what some of the granular issues at hand...
I guess that makes 2 of us, for I see nothing wrong with his post, either. What you fail to see is that the only way to achieve (real) peace is to destroy the enemy. We didn't start WWII, but we finished it, by whatever means necessary, to the extent that the enemy was willing to sustain losses. We also didn't start this war, but it makes no difference if the enemy wears a kimono or a bedsheet on his head, we should show them that we will use whatever means necessary, to whatever extent necessary, until they either realize their folly, or become extinct.....
The A-bomb has saved more lives than any other concoction from the mind of man. Those who denegrate the development and use of the Atomic Bomb live and move in a theoretical world. Once the 2nd bomb was delivered, the most destructive war in the history of the world came to an abrupt end, thus saving perhaps millions of lives. Any other view is revisionist history and fails to understand the nature of man.
I have heard this before about the Soviets taking the northern half of Japan (a al Korea) if the war continued, but what I want to know is HOW they would get there if the United States Navy simply said - NO.
There has never been a Navy of the Ages as powerful as the USN in 1945. The with the WWII in Europe over, the British assembled one of the most powerful units they could assemble, Naval Task-Force 57 to send to assist the US Navy in the Pacific against the Empire of Japan. This British TF-57 was lost in a sea of American ships.
The USSR had no Navy to speak of in the Pacific...
Unless the Soviets could walk on water, they were not getting to Japan without US permission...
dvwjr
The bombing of the Jap homeland was not indiscriminate--only facilities of military value were targeted. The Jap civilians were warned by American bomber crews who risked their lives to drop leaflets informing them that their city was a target and the wisdom of moving. Many, if not most, of these Jap civilians were members of the homeland militia in training to repel an invasion--legitimate targets under the international law of war. Nuking the Japs did not constitute genocide--once they surrendered the war ceased and the defeated enemy was treated by McArthur with kid gloves.
In short, nuking these guys not only brought the war to a rapid end, it made good Japs out of barbaric and butcherous bad Japs. The world, especially Japan, is far better for it.
Allow me to wish you an early Happy Hiroshima Day!
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