[Libloather]

Anyone near this Pemberton Township man may want to find him and thank him...

[ncountylee]

Thanks Harry!

[DoughtyOne]

The POWs is one consideration I had not thought of when considering if the nukes should have been used. I've always focused on the forces it would have taken to conquer the mainland. That alone was staggering to me. Now it's obvious to me that we save many POW lives by droping the nukes. Most Excellent.

[George W. Bush]

Calderone was among hundreds of American soldiers who had been captured in the spring of 1942 on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines. For the next 31/2 years, he and other POWs lived and labored in a camp known as Nagoya No. 6., where they were given one meal of 500 grams of food each evening. If prisoners were unable to work, their daily ration was cut in half, Calderone said.

Few of us can even imagine this, let alone how they must have felt when the war ended and they had survived it unexpectedly.

[Hebrews 11:6]

The atomic bombs permitted my life. My Dad was in the 20th Armored Division, just back from Europe on a thirty-day furlough before shipping out to the Pacific. The 20th was scheduled to be in the first wave to hit the beaches in the March 1946 invasion of Japan. Planners expected casualties in the first wave to be 100%.

[Libloather]

Monster ping...

[Oatka]

I should probably do a Google search, but somewhere I read that 1,000 allied prisoners were dying each day from the brutality, neglect and starvation diets. (Our guys looked like Dachau survivors.)

Then there was a standing order to all POW camp commanders to dispose of their prisoners as soon as the invasion started.

Two anecdotals:
1) When asked if we should have dropped the bomb, people under Jap occupation replied "Why did you drop only two?"
2) When a Jap diplomat was told we had only two bombs, he said "If we'd known you had only two . . ." and then shut up, implying they wouldn't have surrendered even after Nagasaki.

It's all I can do not to belt these latter-day apologists who whine we were wrong to drop the bomb.

Do any of those nitwits honest to God think that Japan wouldn't have used it against us if they had developed one first?

[ErnBatavia]

the prisoners were transported through Hiroshima on the way to evacuation boats. "It was just like you see in the papers. Everything was burnt and bent. They said, 'that's what the bombs did.' "

I would imagine that more than a few of those fortunate survivors got wood for the first time in over three years, having seen that.

[LRS]

Excerpts From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_submarine_I-400

...The Sen Toku I-400 class (イ-400) submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy were the largest submarines of WW2, and the largest in the world until the development of nuclear ballistic submarines in the 1960s. These were submarine aircraft carriers and each of them was able to carry 3 Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft underwater to their destinations. They also carried torpedoes for close range combat and were designed to surface, launch the planes then dive again quickly before they were discovered.

The I-400 was originally designed so that it could travel round-trip to anywhere in the world, and it was specifically intended to destroy the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal. A fleet of 18 boats was planned in 1942, and work on the first one was started in January 1943 at the Kure, Hiroshima arsenal. Within a year the plan was scaled back to five, and only three (the I-400 at Kure, and the I-401 and I-402 at Sasebo) were completed...

...As the war turned against the Japanese and their fleet no longer had free reign over the Pacific, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, devised a daring plan to attack the cities of New York, Washington D.C., and other large American cities as well as to destroy the Panama Canal.

One of Yamamoto’s plans was to use the sen toku (secret submarine attack), so that in the opening days of 1945, preparations were underway to attack the Panama Canal. The strategy was to cut the supply lines and access to the Pacific by U.S. ships. The plan was to sail westward through the Indian Ocean, around the southern tip of Africa, and attack the canal’s Gatun Locks from the east, a direction from which the Americans would not expect and were little prepared to defend. The flights would, of course, be one-way trips. None of the pilots expected to survive the attack, a tactic called tokko. Each pilot was presented with a tokko short sword, symbolic of the ultimate sacrifice.

Before the attack could commence from the Japanese naval base at Maizuru, word reached Japan that the Allies were preparing for an assault on the home islands. The mission was changed to attack the Allied naval base on Ulithi where the invasion was being assembled. Before that could take place, the Emperor announced the surrender of Japan...

[WalterSkinner]

..and I will add once again that the guys stationed in eastern China, one of which was my father, would have surely been part of Olympic or Coronet -- needless to say, I might not be writing this.

[TheDon]

Happy Hiroshima Day! Happy Nagasaki Day! Truly days of celebration for the USA.

[patriciaruth]

The Raid just released in limited theatres with Benjamin Bratt (not bad), and Joseph Finnes (good as always)
is true story about a rescue mission to save 500 American POW's in the Philippines.
The Japanese had scheduled to execute them (by pouring kerosene on them while in an air raid shelter and burning them alive) because of the successful landing of McArthur and the imminent loss of the parts of the Philippines that the Japanese still controlled.

I think we all should support The Raid by going to see it in a theatre. We drove 40 miles to see it and it was definitely worth the time and money.

Forced by bankruptcy to put out this movie, which has been on their shelves for 2-3 years, Miramax and Hollywood need to know that we will support pro-American movies and not go to all the anti-American trash that is scheduled to be released this year.